Blog Post 170 – A Little Gift

Hi everyone!

I hope you’ve all had a festive holiday season and are looking forward to a fantastic 2013! I’m working hard on a number of projects at the moment, including new posts for the blog, getting new show topics and guests lined up, starting a New World Witchery contest, finishing a school project and an assignment for an academic journal, finding PhD programs, continuing work on any of the books I’ve got in the works (and looking for publishers for those books), planning out some second-half-of-the-year classes for my local magical group, keeping up with my reading list, learning a couple new languages (and refreshing my Spanish, too). Not to mention working a day job, being a father to two brilliant kids, and a husband to a very patient and very loving wife.

All of which is to say that life is very busy, but not so busy that I don’t decide to take on MORE crazy projects! (As a Gemini, having too many irons in the fire is par for the course, apparently). During the latter part of last year, I was listening to a conversation between Fire Lyte and Velma Nightshade on their joint podcast about the lack of witchy apps out there, and specifically how there isn’t anything that can integrate with their calendars like an almanac app. Well, I’m not a programmer of any kind, but I do know how to go through and use Outlook to generate iCal files, so I started working on something to fill that need. And here it is!

A Witch’s Calendar – iCal version for 2013 (Q1).

The calendar includes witchy holidays with lore, links, recipes, etc. I’ve included a number of the days I personally observe, and the full and new moons. Many of the links will bring you to the New World Witchery site for posts on the topics highlighted in the calendar alert, and some will send you to book recommendations, other sites with related lore and/or products, and so forth. For example, the calendar entry on New Year’s Day (which is when the whole thing starts…sorry for the delay in releasing it) includes a link to our entry on that day’s practices, a link to Sarah Lawless’ post on Hogmany, and a click-through to Lucky Mojo’s Chinese Wash, so you can start your year with a clean and lucky house.

It’s in a zip file, so please make sure that you can open those and that you know how to add an iCal file to your favorite calendar (a quick Google search will probably help you figure out how to do that).

I should point out a few caveats:

• This is only for the first quarter of 2013. I’ll be working on getting other quarters up as soon as I can, but I wanted to get at least the first three months out there.
• There may be one or two of these dates that have an entry with no links, or which are blank in some way. I’ll be correcting those in future versions.
• It’s totally free and you can share it as much as you like, but please let folks know where you found it.

It’s sort of a New Year’s/Twelfth Night gift to y’all for being so spectacular, so I hope it’s useful to some folks out there. If someone out there is more technically gifted than I am and wants to undertake any improvements that integrate with this calendar, I’m a-okay with that. Just send me an email and let me know! And if you find this useful and all that, we’d certainly welcome donations to help support future work.

Here’s wishing you a very happy New Year! Thanks for all you’ve done for the show, and for being a spectacular audience!

-Cory