Almost to the freezing point this morning...

And I'm sure that it was reached in some places in the Valley; 34° here. It is a ferial day, a day de ea, of the week itself, in the ordo I use. Baked a pan of corn bread, finished putting away the lot of oil used for that poor chicken yesterday, parts of which I shall no doubt be eating until the end of the week, and, since I was fussing about in the kitchen, have already made breakfast. So Terce will happen after 0800.

Choices this morning, I think. Peteris Vask's Viola Concerto, Vaughan William's Serenade to Music, and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony at Bergen. Chopin's Concerto no 1 and Tchaikovsky's Symphony no 4 at Copenhagen. Penderecki's Adagietto and Beethoven's Piano Concerto no 3 and Symphony no 7 at Warsaw at 1030 (which is when the Bergen Symphony concert begins). A concert in Lisbon at a site I've never managed to negotiate through, the Duo Arsis, guitarists, performing works of Bach, Shostakovich, Debussy and others. Will listen to the Beethoven Festival concert at Warsaw, I expect.

Time for Terce.

It is the last concert of the 24th International Beethoven Festival at Warsaw. The more I've listened to Andrzej Wierciński the more highly I esteem his playing. 

At Althouse earlier, in a comment on this post, 'Buwaya' remarked:

The greater reality is that your national government, and much of your society and culture, is decadent and depraved beyond any normal human remedy. What personal actions are called for once this is understood? 

There are various ways to deny this, to ignore it (whistling past the graveyard), to attack messengers, to, well, fail to deal. I have seen this often enough among corporate management, where the most popular way to handle an impending disaster is to focus energetically on some minor peripheral detail, usually unconnected to the main issue.

He is an educated, cultured Roman Catholic, given to comments even more pedagogical than mine and without my pedantic sententiousness, now living near Bilbao, an exile from the San Francisco area. Dr Althouse felt it necessary, a couple of days ago, to defend Jeffrey Toobin, of all people (I believe she has pointed out flaws in his legal analysis on occasion); her 'liberal sense of fairness' objected to the opprobrium heaped upon him, or something. Decadence, depravity. 

Twelve days, more or less. Judge Barrett should be confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court in four. We'll see how much rioting that provokes.  

A hawk of some species just glided onto or across the roof-- I looked up at the squirrel's alarm and then before I knew what was happening watched it overhead, for about half a second. Time for None.

***