An epiphany

I rely almost exclusively on my Handspring Visor now to know what day it is and what's going on on the day, but I hadn't installed the holidays for 2003 yet, so I was surprised when Gard came by my office and asked me what Epiphany was. I said, "You want to know what an epiphany is?" and he said no, he knew what an epiphany was, he wanted to know what Epiphany is. He said the calendar said today was Epiphany. I think he had been standing back in the back of the office waiting for the microwave to ding and had been reading the bulletin board.

Anyway, I was sort of embarrassed not to know, so I looked it up:

Epiphany [Gr.,=showing], a prime Christian feast, celebrated Jan. 6, called also Twelfth Day or Little Christmas. Its eve is Twelfth Night. It commemorates three events--the baptism of Jesus (Mark 1), the visit of the Wise Men to Bethlehem (Mat. 2), and the miracle at Cana (John 2). In his baptism Jesus' sonship to God was manifested to the world; in the visit of the Wise Men he was manifested as king to the Gentiles; and at the marriage feast at Cana his power to perform miracles (a divine prerogative) was shown. In popular celebration the feast is far more ancient than Christmas. Technically it is more important than Christmas, ranking after Easter and Pentecost. It is a day of gifts in many countries. In the Eastern Church the waters are blessed on this day. The word epiphany means a manifestation, usually of divine power. Thus the actual appearance of God (as in the burning bush) or a moment of divine revelation may be called an epiphany.

And then I installed the 2003 (and 2004 and 2005) holidays on my Visor. I was kind of surprised when I bought it that it didn't have any holidays already in the calendar. I don't remember now whether there were no holidays at all, or just the most major ones. I got an application called Holidates which takes care of that, but you have to manually check which ones you want to install. Which is good, of course, because it lets you avoid installing everything while letting you pick the ones that are meaningful to you. But you do have to do it. I'm good now through 2005, and I would assume I'll have a new device by then.

Current desktop at work (left monitor):

No one is surprised when men act like teenaged boys, so why is everyone always surprised when women act like teenaged girls? :)

The right monitor is one of my own designs; it just seemed to go along with the color scheme of the other one: