volunteering

Today starts the last week of the current month, the third week of living by the almanac I've been crafting. Somewhat coincidentally the first day of the next year falls on the last day of this week. One of the history books I've been reading mentioned that the English Parliament moved the start of the year from 25 March to 1 January beginning in 1752, apparently influenced by other European powers that subsequently rippled into the US. I'm not sure why anybody shifted to January to begin with, but moving back to the equinox has felt like a form of therapy. A week and change after a solstice, January feels arbitrary and stunting. Rebirth in a time of wintering is a restless hibernation no different than scrolling in bed. Now I'll count the days between the winter solstice and the spring equinox as the final quarter of the year, a time to nest and reset, and the equinox to the next solstice as the first quarter, a time to get outside and garden. Moon phases divide weeks, which may have as few as six and as many as nine days, with months beginning at the new moon. Days, months, and years are numbered independently, which allows for situations where a year begins partway through a month. I have been maintaining an identification with the Gregorian day to make it easier to know when I am. That has made it possible to encode civic calendars in iCalendar format and overlay those events on a planner view. For "religious" (cleric?) calendars I'm thinking to implement a bespoke cron-like language to specify events either as a specific day number or as a relative position within weeks, months, quarters, and years. I don't want to live per the Gregorian calendar, but it does help to have as an intermediary for translating dates for exchange.

Regardless of week length, I've shifted to using the last day of the week as a day for chores and cleaning concluding with weed and beer, and the first day as a day for sleeping in and creative indulgence. Somewhere between the two I've been reflecting on the prior week and sketching out priorities for the coming week, which feels like a more frequent, smaller scale version of what I want to achieve with the year transition. So I'll have some sort of feast for Huitzilopochtli in the coming days. I'll make offerings to the thrift shop, cut my hair, rotate the framed pictures around the house, and finish painting the bathroom, then get rowdy in the name of the Hummingbird God.

I volunteered at the Flower Show on Friday. I've only been once before, in 2021 when they first held it at FDR Park. There was a call for volunteers in my Tree Tenders course so I thought I'd go again. I worked the afternoon shift then a friend stopped by to visit the show with me. I had all kinds of thoughts about volunteerism and unpaid labor, but for three hours of my time I got a few hours of his and we both got in for free. He bought us dinner, and I brought an umbrella I held above us on the walk back to the train station. I was so spaced out full of THC and love that I missed my stop. I noticed one of my co-volunteers happened to catch the same train as I did as she was deboarding, and we yelled our farewells across the car.

On Sunday I made it to a middle school production of Shrek the Musical before heading back to the city for an Oscars party then presented with the historical society yesterday, the culmination of work over the last few months. My topic was the Lansdale Music Hall, a theater I didn't get to visit in a town I've never lived in. Still the exercise helped forge my connection to the community and develop my writing, historical research, and communication skills. I wound up on a bit of a deep dive into Albertus Shelley, a violinist who performed at the hall in the late nineteenth century. He was a local celebrity in his time then held prominence in Harlem and El Paso, where he passed away in his 50s. He was moved back to Philly for burial in a cemetery not far from here that I'm thinking to visit in the spring.

I baked dog cookies earlier in the week. I need to tweak the recipe and process, but the first batch came out alright. We hiked a little around the Wissahickon when the weather was nice and otherwise have walked around the boro when we can. The wind hasn't let up much in the last several days and it finally actually snowed. It's a cold end to the year, but it is ending.