I’m Fixing to Get Ready for the Rest of This Year

I’m fixing to get ready for the rest of this year.

Today is the 229th day of this year. It would be the 228th except this year is a leap year. But any way you look at it we got 137 days left to go.

Leap years are added to the calendar to keep it working properly. The 365 days of the annual calendar are meant to match up with the solar year. A solar year is the time it takes the Earth to complete its orbit around the Sun. But the actual time it takes the Earth to revolve around the Sun is 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. So the calendar year of 365 days and the solar year don’t match precisely.

Even though it doesn’t seem like a big difference, if we just ignored that quarter of a day for four years the four extra quarter days would make the calendar fall behind the solar year by about one day. If we just ignored it for 100 years the calendar year would fall behind the solar year by about 25 days. If this happened we would be celebrating the Fourth of July on July 29, Christmas wouldn’t come until January 18, and eight days later we would celebrate the New Year on January 26. I suppose it wouldn’t effect Easter because it always comes in conjunction with the spring equinox.

But worst of all it would be the end of September instead of the end of August before football season started. One good way to look at it is that if your birthday was today, August 16, you wouldn’t be a year older for another 25 days. Imagine the confusion.

But wait, it’s not over yet. The math of adding an extra day to the calendar every four years to make up for the extra quarter of a day in the solar year doesn’t work out exactly right. As I mentioned earlier the solar year is just about 365 and one-quarter days long, but not exactly! The exact length of a solar year is actually 11 minutes and 14 seconds less than 365 and one-quarter days. That means that even if you add a leap day every four years, the calendar would still overshoot the solar year by 11 minutes and 14 seconds per year. After 128 years these minutes and seconds would start to add up and we would gain an entire extra day.

So the rule of adding a leap year every four years is a good rule but not quite good enough. To rectify the situation the Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 in which it was decided to omit leap years three times every 400 years. This would shorten the calendar every so often and rid it of the annual excess of 11 minutes and 14 seconds. So in addition to the rule that a leap year occurs every four years, a new rule was added that a century year is not a leap year unless it is evenly divisible by 400. This rule manages to eliminate three leap years every few hundred years.

This rule works very well in bringing the calendar and the solar year in harmony, pretty much eliminating those pesky extra 11 minutes and 14 seconds. But still the calendar year and the solar year are just about a half a minute off. And at that rate it will take 3,300 years before the two calendars get off by a day again.

I don’t know what we’ll do then. I’m fixing to try and figure it out.

According to Irish tradition a man who receives a proposal for marriage from a woman on leap day has to accept it. Too late ladies! The 29th of February has come and gone, so either you’ll have to entice him to ask you, or be fixing to wait for four more years.