Sixty-one

What? Where have I been? Oh, you know. Job. Husband. Kid. Freelance work. A house to keep up with.

We bought another cow this past weekend. What? Yeah, “another cow.” Now we’re up to three cows. We bought the first two around the holidays. Lucy and Ethel. The new cow is Roseanne. She has a heifer calf, her name is Darlene. What? Yeah, yeah. Television names. You noticed. Lucy and Ethel are both pregnant. If Lucy has a bull-calf, just guess what his name is going to be.

Uh…we’re starting with the prep for the Myrtle Beach trip. Seth is already talking about what he’ll wear. We priced airline tickets and discovered it was WAAAAY cheaper to fly to Charlotte than directly to Myrtle Beach. So we'll rent a car (we would have anyway) and drive down to the beach, it's about three, three and a half hours. For an old hand at car-trips like myself, that's a cake-walk.

Seth. Seth is good. I am finding, however, that the Fours are definitely worse than the Twos or the Threes. And when you’re dealing with a smart Four, you’re really in trouble. I don’t have any specific stories to pass along today, just suffice it to say he's got a huge vocabulary and he knows how to use it. He also knows how to use charm and dissimulation.

Also, in case anyone else was wondering but had never bothered to really find out, I just read a little about why February only has 28 days. Probably at some point in my youth we studied this topic, but I didn't retain the info. So...

When the Roman calendar was first created, it was established to keep track of the agricultural cycles of planting and harvesting. There were, initially, only ten months, March to December. But a guy named Numa Pompilius decided, around 3000 years ago, that a calendar that basically overlooked one-sixth of the year didn't really make sense, so he decided that a year should have 355 days...approximately the length of twelve lunar cycles. Extra days ("leap" days) were added to keep the calendar roughly in tune with the seasons, and January and February were added then (to the end of the year). Since Romans considered that even numbers were unlucky, he made seven months 29 days long, and four months 31 days long.

But, it turned out he’d need one even-numbered month to make it come out to 355 days. So February was picked, since, at that time, it was the last month of the year, and was “assigned” only 28 days. It wasn’t until a long time later that Julius Ceasar reorganized the calendar, bumped it up to 365 days, and moved January and February to the beginning of the year.