It's looking to be another grey and rainy day...

Following a huge downpour at 0300 or so that had, though, petered out by... well, by the time I had gotten to the lessons of Matins. The weather mages have issued a  'winter weather advisory'-- 'it might be icy and it might snow and then again it might not'-- which is evidently less ominous that a 'watch', although the 'watch' earlier in the week meant the same thing. 

Holy Mass is not streamed from Saint-Eugène this morning so I will read my usual missa sicca instead i.e. this just means that one reads, prays those parts of the Mass that are susceptible to this: the Ordinary and the proper, the lessons, and those prayers that are capable of being divorced from the sacrificial actio of the priest. I say the Aufer a nobis before the Introit, e.g., but not the Oramus te Domine; the Deus qui humanae substantiae but not the other prayers at the Offertory; the Preface and Pater noster but nothing of the Canon nor of the succeeding prayers, although I do the Domine, non sum dignus, Agnus Dei, the Last Gospel and the Leonine Prayers. I don't actually remember what specifically the Carthusians include and don't include in their devotional missa sicca; I suspect I say rather more than is provided in their breviaries but maybe not (the Last Gospel and Leonine Prayers aren't in their Rite). For example, my recollection is that there is a lesson and Gospel provided in the books. 

The skies have cleared and my apprehension that it would be grey and rainy all day seems to have been ill-founded; those silly weather mages, pft. Am proceeding to breakfast and then to Regional Diversification. Or perhaps some silly novel. 

Ante Sextam. I did finish the silly novel; silly, well, in comparison to Regional Diversification, I guess, but entertaining enough, a re-telling of the Robin Hood story set in Wales just after the Norman Conquest. There are apparently three of 'em but am not inclined to purchase the second and third: my judgment, based on what I did read, is that the author ought to re-write the three volumes into one, deepening the characterisations and dispensing with quite so many and such obvious stereotypes of the Welsh. In any event, while I was indeed turning those pages I was more closely following the German text of Die Zauberflöte from the Hofoper, this performance from January 2015 directed by Adam Fischer, Íride Martínez the Queen of the Night and Markus Werba Papageno. It dawned on me only half way through that Maestro Fischer is the Austro-Hungarian Orchestra, 'complete Haydn' Adam Fischer. Am remarkably dense at times.

Now find myself hesitating to buy Fischer's complete Haydn symphonies for $56 because of one review at Amazon in which the author goes on about audible 'breathing'.

Verbum sapientibus from a wise French priest.

Militia est vita hominis super terram; et sicut dies mercenarii, dies ejus, the life of man upon earth is a warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling. These words from the mouth of the holy man Job (Job VII,1) take on a new significance at the beginning of great and holy Lent, which is par excellence the time of spiritual combat....

LDVM