Feria glacei

Tomorrow is New Refrigerator Day. Or at least, it is supposed to be. I know better than to count my Maytags before they are delivered.

A year or so (or longer?) ago, I was doing some reading on religious practices in Roman and pre-Roman Gaul, trying to catch up on current scholarship on the Coligny Calendar. It's all muddy waters, of course, but I came away with the sense that the indeterminacy was almost the point.¹ Everything was potentially a moveable feast, depending on when the full moon came after the equinox, or when the hawthorn trees bloomed, or whether it happened to rain and therefore the bonfires couldn't be lit.

I think I'm prepared, philosophically at least, for New Refrigerator Day to be rescheduled due to forces beyond my control.

But if it takes a month to get the fridge, the way it did with the water softener, you can bet I'm going to get something more than philosophical on someone's backside.

¹Actually, that seems to be a theme in my researches -- I remember giving a paper at a conference once where Paul Strohm was in the audience. When I was finished reading, he raised his hand to ask a question, and I felt a flash of terror, but his only comment was 'it's all about indeterminacy, isn't it?' And, in fact, it really was, so I could agree with him and then, somehow, I was off the hook.