(no subject)

Today I'm sorting out a calendar, sunset times and phases of the moon for a particular year. For anything more recent than the late eighteenth century, this is dead easy: my favourite calendar program will do it all automatically. For anything earlier, I have to adjust it manually to fit the Julian reality. I use another calendar program to calculate the difference and then sort it, slowly. There is probably a better method than this, but it acquaints me with the characteristics of the specific year as well, which is a good thing. I love knowing that a leap year in the Christian calendar was immediately followed by a leap year in the Jewish, for instance: my year was a year of re-alignment with the cosmos.

Adjusting everything mechanically also gets me into the strange mindset Northern Hemisphere types suffer, with sunset at 5 pm in January.

Which reminds me, it's only a few days before our nights stop getting longer. I ought to sleep more while I can still justify it...