Daily Archives: February 12, 2025

Excuse the title. I’ve seen Office Space one too many times. Zoom on the picture below and you’ll get it.

My point in posting today is that Ash Wednesday is three weeks out. I’m planning out my Lent now. The Church gives us a wonderful period of three Sundays to gradually step back from worldly concerns such as food before we dive into the 40 days proper.

Might I offer some suggestions over these next few weeks that have helped me during Lent over the past few years? I’m going to anyway so I’m not sure why that’s a question. These are things I’ve either stumbled upon or that others have recommended.

First up, a video on fasting. Fasting is the heart of Lent but has been so watered down as to be almost meaningless. When I tried to take this seriously, tremendous things happened in my life. And yes, it is possible for a grown man with responsibilities in the world to go with hardly any food for six weeks.

A good friend and longtime reader commented to me this evening that he was happy to see me write longer-form content. He was referring to my barber shop post of two days ago. Then it dawned on me. This friend has only been reading my blog since it morphed into HM2.0. It’s no secret that this page used to have a slightly different bent to it. In fact, noticing yesterday that I had posted for 1,000 consecutive days (only because I challenged myself to do that) prompted me to go back and look at some pre-current-blog posts. So for starters much of what existed here prior to about 2019 has been set to private by me; and I did that roughly around 2019. Those posts still exist but they’re in the vault. I read them from time to time but you likely never will. Why did I set them private? I was starting to be discovered by students and really just wanted the blog to be private. I made it available to the handful of family and friends who had been faithful readers and that was that.

Between 2019 and May of 2022 I may have posted a grand total of ten times. Writing had become somewhat of a chore for me during the coof days. On May 16, 2022 I posted an “I’m back” letter explaining that I had decided to write again (“A Trad Dad Makes His Tepid Debut”) but that from that moment forth I would be writing about more “church-y” things in addition to stories of my daily life as a dad, and HM2.0 – Musings of a Trad Dad – was born. Two days later I posted again and this time the post was picked up by Frank Walker at Canon212 and I haven’t stopped writing since.

For those with the time or will to scroll back and back back, well… Some of those 1.0 posts are pretty good if I do say so. Here below is one of my personal favorites. It incorporates quite a bit of “eras” as they say. It’s a post from 2019 that points back to a post from 2012. Offbeat? A bit. Nonetheless, I hope you get a chuckle out of it.