It’s February and I can’t believe it. If I blink I expect that February will be gone, seeing that it is a short month anyway. I think part of my trouble is that we don’t actually have a 2026 calendar on the wall. Normally, both my husband and I grab calendars from church and then we have to toss one. So this year neither one of us took a calendar. I didn’t even notice until a week ago and it still hasn’t reached to top of my ToDo list. ~~ Get a new calendar!~~ but it needs to.

I could just print calendar pages from the web, but unless I printed a year of pages, the problem would arise again and again. 

Anyway, today is the Feast of Saint Blaise and throats will be blessed at church. I went looking for pictures but didn’t find much, which is odd. Here’s one from the Art Institute of Chicago. The left-hand panels are Saint Blaise and the right-hand panels are Saint Agatha. The middle panel is the Crucifixion of Jesus above the Crowning of Mary in Heaven. Saint Augustine is in the center between Saint Blaise and Saint Agatha.

Retable of Saints Athanasius, Blaise, and Agatha. Date: c. 1440–c. 1445. Artist: Master of Riglos (Spanish, active c. 1435–1460). AIC. public domain. A retable is a painting above the altar.

The ice in my area is still here. Temperatures haven’t gotten above freezing for days and days, so no melting to help with ice removal. You can walk on top of the snow/ice if you don’t slip on the glaze, but if you break through it’s eight or ten inches deep in the hole. 

I’ve cooked a lot, and today I hope to sew a lot. A purple vestment is in the works. And possibly learning to make a pall. That’s the stiff square on top of the chalice during Mass. It’s there to keep bees, and whatnot, from falling into the Precious Blood. And yes, that did and does happen. I have a pattern that my embroidery machine will stitch, but it has ‘wheat’ in the pattern that is done in orange so it looks like a weird lobster. See what I mean?

I have to make some changes, and use a white background. We are twenty degrees warmer than we have been and were still below freezing this morning. Ah, well. Winter!