Resting on the kitchen counter earlier. I left it alone and it's gone now; while I hope that it flew off into a more congenial environment it's possible that the new housemate squashed it. He may live with certain infirmities consequent to age but he is a fierce cleaner in the kitchen, I will grant him that. The landlady is at one end of the spectrum (a wipedown of the counter perhaps once in a month), I use the sponge rather vaguely after each use of the counter, the housemate being at the opposite end of the spectrum: he lifts the toaster, the draining mat for the dish drying rack, and other assorted pieces of nonsense that rest on the surface of the counter. And I'm pretty sure that he isn't simply making a show of effort, either, at the beginning of his tenancy.
Tsk; the point was that the ladybug (or ladybird, as seems to be the more common term in the United Kingdom) takes its name from Our Lady the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is, variously, Frauenhenne, bête de la vierge, jungfru Marias gullhöna, or vrouwenbeestje. The seven spots that some of them sport (Coccinella septempunctata) represent Our Lady's Seven Sorrows.
It is the second day in the Octave of Saint Lawrence, the feast of Saints Tiburtius and the virgin Susanna, martyrs, and, in the Novus Ordo calendar, the feast of Saint Clare, foundress of the Poor Clares, the 'Poor Ladies of the Order of Minors'. It is actually the anniversary of her birth into Heaven (which is the default goal in general: a feast day is celebrated on the anniversary of death; many times it doesn't work out that way because other saints' days have already 'occupied' a particular date over the course of centuries etc etc) so quite how the date of her feast was arranged before the latest calendar, I don't know.
Am going to listen to a recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Beethoven, Messiaen) that was recorded in Graz last month in an hour or so; it is the first time I've gone to ORF, the Austrian state radio station. Leave it to the Austrians; most online radio stations display their programs by the hour or quarter hour, or by program, but Oe1 has a graphical display that counts off the progress of the individual minutes, and in fact you can watch a little red circle advance through each minute. They may have, a large number of them, apostasized from the Faith but their state broadcasting service is impressive.
in Duszniki-Zdro, Poland at the Chopin Festival there; it's being broadcast on Radio Poland's Channel Two. Beethoven's Les Adieux and Moonlight sonatas, Schubert's Drei Klavierstücke D 946 and the Impromptu in A flat major D 899, Chopin's A flat major Ballade and the Étude in C sharp minor op 25 n 7. This has proved to be a good choice, although the interval interview with Jiricek von Arnim in English being translated in Police is confusing my ears; he is doing master classes at the Chopin Festival, evidently.
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