It’s been a few years since I’ve been to an Easter vigil Mass, and my only experience has been at an Episcopal parish. This America piece reminds me of the sheer length of the liturgy at Roman churches like ours.
I’ll be fortifying myself with caffeine later this afternoon.
Finally able to watch live White Sox baseball after cutting the cable cord, except it’s on Apple TV+ without our great local broadcasters.
Appreciate hearing women handle play-by-play and some analysis, but the hi-res “Megalodon” shots are weirding me out.
Lent ended on Holy Thursday. And on Good Friday, we made our first attempt at hot cross buns. Not pretty, but we’ll settle for fluffy and tasty.
At a pep rally with incredibly loud marching band music for incoming freshmen at the high school. Having major flashbacks to my own south suburban San Diego high school experience. Except with way, WAY more white people.
Am I wrong to be creeped out by MLB umpires wearing the logo of “the official cryptocurrency exchange of Major League Baseball”?
Several YouTube instructional video replays later — as well as at least two attempts to swat a playful cat away — I finally succeeded at making a palm cross.
Pleasantly surprised to see three or four Padres fans on this Spin list of 108 musicians predicting the 2022 baseball season. Still too many Dodger followers, though. And it’s sorely lacking Geddy Lee talking about his Blue Jays.
Theologian Greg Hillis tells MLB: “Quit Trying to ‘Fix’ Baseball” (Commonweal).
Don’t run from baseball’s leisurely pace. Embrace it. Teach about it. Market it. … No matter how distracted we are, we know intuitively that there are deep patterns within us and without us, and that happiness is in some way connected to our discovery and contemplation of them.
Hillis’s essay is prompting me to give Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture another spin.
Random finding: “Rare footage discovered of Prince, 11, at 1970 Minneapolis teachers’ strike” (Guardian)
Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic:
I’ve noticed a new island of work at the end of the day. Sometime around 9 p.m., I’ll open my computer and see that I have about a dozen urgent-ish emails and Slack messages. So, while in front of the television or with a podcast playing in the background, I’ll spend a late-night hour or more replying to these messages, typing the same intro over and over: ‘Sorry for the delay …’ ‘Oops, I missed this …’ ‘Hey, just seeing that you …’
I can relate. In fact, I’ll probably be online like this tonight after F and C go to bed to catch up on work; I have an appointment this afternoon, so I’ll play catchup if needed later.
Most meetings, I believe, are useless time sucks spawned directly from Satan’s Outlook calendar. Fortunately, I am less prone to meetings than some of my colleagues, though I am stuck with my share. Others, unfortunately, aren’t so lucky:
‘People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic,’ says Mary Czerwinski, the research manager of the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft. ‘That means everything else—like coding and email and writing—is being pushed later.’ Workday creep and meeting creep aren’t two separate trends; they’re the same trend.
(In other news, there’s a “Human Understanding and Empathy” group at Microsoft. Who knew?)
I’m grateful to have a job with this kind of flexibility. But I can’t help but feel somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of being “at work” around the clock.
Thank God I work late less than I used to, and only if it means I’m able to take care of important errands or spend time with family. But it requires a lot of restraint of my workaholic tendencies, which fortunately have dissipated with age and a growing sense of knowing better.
Nothing says “the Midwest” like monthly tornado siren testing.
Back to work today. Wish F and I were still in St. Louis, strung out on frozen custard and Provel cheese.
Took F and one of her best friends to see “Princess Mononoke” at a local theater and then Starbucks afterward. Not surprised to learn more about Frannie’s middle school life in one afternoon than I have in 3 years of asking her “How was school today?” every weekday.
We got dessert at St. Louis’ oldest frozen custard stand. I went over my carb limit again with a “Crater”: vanilla frozen custard, hot fudge, devil’s food cake, whipped cream, and evil. (I also walked 10,000+ steps at the zoo.) Will be better about the carbs starting tomorrow.
Joining a parish with periodic tamale sales after all Masses is one of the best spiritual decisions I’ve ever made.
Wordle 281 4/6
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Refreshed after a daylong silent retreat at my parish on the Passion. After a rough week of frustration and extended family drama, I’m deeply grateful for this jumpstart of my Lenten season.
Despite the joy of a twofer kind of cool day—my kid’s birthday and the Feast of the Annunciation—I continue to be stuck in the middle of a painful dispute that heated up this week and involves people dear to me. If you’re one to do such things, please pray for me. Thanks.
Population drops in California’s urban centers: “We are in this new demographic era for California of very slow or maybe even negative growth,” a demographer tells the Los Angeles Times.
Way behind on Franniepalooza preparations for F’s 14th birthday today. Grateful for a work-from-home job that (a) has flexibility, and (b) things have been slow at the office.
It’s Mom’s birthday today. She would have been 91. Had some lumpia – albeit frozen from Seafood City, not homemade – to remember her by. It was, of course, not nearly as good as hers.
Happy birthday, Mom. Wish you were here.
Wordle 278 4/6
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Wordle is a gateway drug to the Spelling Bee game on The New York Times crossword app.
C and I play it over breakfast or after dinner. We’re on a streak at the moment.
This is the kind of Winter Olympic coverage I need: “What is Ice Dancing and is It Different From Figure Skating?”