Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Well, another Ash Wednesday is upon us.  Ol’ Robbo dutifully toddled off to early Mass this morning and is now sporting the rayther outsized thumbprint of Father S on his brow.  Given the, ah, heightened state of tensions current between Caesar and the Church, it will be interesting to see what kind of reaction I get in the hallways of the bureaucracy today.¹  For some reason regarding this, the Firefly theme has been running through my brain all morning (“You can’t take the sky from me.”)

As for Lent, as is self-evident I’ve decided not to give up blogging per se, although I hope to confine myself to religious matters and curtail the more frivolous side of things.  Those of you interested in the former, welcome aboard.  Those of you more interested in the latter, well, at ease.  Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.

Apart from that, I intend to give up (well, as of bedtime last night did give up) the gargle, as well as movies and teevee.  I also intend to confine myself to reading books of an improving nature (starting today with GKC’s The Dumb Ox) and to only listen to musick di chiesa.    (The first week or so of not having the radio on in the car and my office is always a bit odd, and this morning I also discovered in its absence that the ol’ Jeep could really do with a tune-up.)

Hunting up posts from previous Ash Wednesdays, I see that I’ve said pretty much the same thing the past few years as above.  In hindsight, I’m afraid that while my intentions have been good, my follow-through has not always been what I could wish.  Ah well, as the Alan Jackson song says, I’m a work in progress.  Perhaps this will be the year to really nail it.

¹ UPDATE:  A colleague  who, if I’ve heard her say once that she’s a former Catholic, I’ve heard her say it a thousand times, stuck her head round the corner and said in a smooth voice, “Is it just me, or are all the crosses bigger this year?”   I simply smiled and replied that I couldn’t speak for anyone else but that my own priest has been quite consistent over the years in the size of the mark he plants.   (In other words, Father S was a RadTrad before it was cool.)