Today I was scheduled to take the afternoon off of work, and I thought about taking the morning off too but decided to go ahead and work. It's a good thing I did, too, because a candidate who is coming for a visit on Monday had all sorts of last-minute questions and emails he couldn't find which we had definitely sent to him, and then our guest speaker who was coming next week had her flight abruptly canceled, so I was trying with no success to cancel hotel rooms and catering charges because it was too last-minute. In my opinion, the airline should have to pay for all this. At least we only have to pay for one night in the hotel, and a professor said his students who were planning to come to the talk as part of his class can probably eat all the food.
I was happy about one thing: last year was the first time we didn't spend down our flex account for healthcare that I can remember, partly because we thought Travalon's procedure was going to be so expensive, but then insurance actually covered it 100%. I had just realized we could have been using flex spending all along for antihistamines, cold medicine, etc., so I made PDFs of all our Walgreens receipts that had FSA spending on them. (Kudos to Walgreens for having such a convenient system for this!) I submitted them yesterday, and already by the end of the day most had been approved. Today we got a deposit for $750, which feels like free money but it's really just my money that I put away coming back to me, kind of like a tax refund. And we'd already spent that money on over-the-counter drugs and COVID tests, so it was definitely just a refund, even if it feels like found money.
Despite how crazy it had been this morning, I took the afternoon off, since at that point all the fires were put out and hopefully any new fires can wait until Monday. I went to the Good Friday service in the gym, and the choir was amazing again. I squeezed Niko in my pocket and constantly shifted my weight during that really, really, really long Gospel, which they chanted so that was lovely. I was amazed by everyone else around me standing still - how do they not get tired and have to shift their weight? What's my problem? The only thing is that we didn't get to do the crowd parts, which I always feel bring home our culpability, as we're all hollering, "Crucify him!" Since there are no kneelers in the gym, we just stood through the really long intercessory prayer part too - usually that's so up and down. Every year I get kind of verklempt when venerating the cross, but I thought, "Not this year. I'm not really feeling it." But of course as soon as I touched the feet of the corpus on the cross, I began to cry. Is it a Pavlovian reaction, like I know I'm supposed to feel sorrow so I've trained myself to do so? Or is it supernatural? Right after that we sang "O Sacred Head, Surrounded," and that just made me cry harder. The only hymn that has even more Lenten lyrics that I know is "Ah, Holy Jesus." The people around me must have thought I was nuts, with tears running down my face. It was right at three too - the hour when Jesus died. So maybe that sounds depressing, but somehow it felt really good, like cleansing or something. I think the woman to my left was crying too, but the person to my right was a young guy, and if he felt contrition, he didn't show it.
It was a beautiful day out, finally feeling a bit like spring, so after the service I took a Stations of the Cross walk in the neighborhood. Here's irony: I had taken a rosary walk between work and the service, and of course I was in a little bit of a hurry, but due to fasting I thought, "Today I won't push myself." So all those times I walked as fast and hard as I could and didn't get vigorous minutes? Today I got not just vigorous minutes but even peak minutes when I was consciously trying NOT to push myself! I don't understand. Anyway, after the service I took my Stations of the Cross chaplet and tried to pray it, but I don't have the stations completely memorized, and sometimes the tiny pictures on the chaplet confused me: is that Jesus meeting his mother? Veronica? the women of Jerusalem? Or wait - is it Simon of Cyrene?
In the evening Jilly Moose picked me up, and we went to the East Side Club for their last fish fry of the season. Rich got there not long after we did, and we got soup and salad while waiting for Travalon. The waitress was so nice - she let us go to the salad bar even though we hadn't officially ordered yet. When Travalon arrived, we all ordered the fish fry. Man, was I hungry! And that was so many calories that my diet app didn't yell at me for eating too few calories today, like it sometimes does on fast days and it won't let me enter the day until I put in some fake calories. Fortunately they don't have dessert, but I was pretty stuffed anyway. Then we all hurried home in time for Night Prayer, led by the Dairyman's Daughter. I sang "Ah, Holy Jesus," since that is the hymn we always sang at the Lutheran Good Friday services. Of course, I couldn't do the part where on verses 2-5 we broke into a cappella four-part harmony. That always gave me the chills, it was so beautiful. Maybe someday I'll experience that again.
Famous Hat
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