Happy February 29th!

It only comes around once every four years, so savor it. I never knew the leap year had such an interesting story until I heard about it on NPR the other day. How all this business started was that the world used the Julian calendar from the first century, until people noticed that the date Easter was celebrated (the vernal equinox) kept drifting slightly forward, since the calendar year (365.25 days) was just a little longer than the time it took for the earth to circle the sun. That meant people were one calendar day forward every 128 years. Pope Gregory XIII found that unacceptable, so created a new calendar (the Gregorian calendar), which we use today. He kept most of the Julian calendar, but added the rule that years that are divisible by 100 are not leap years. However, years that are divisible by 400 are leap-years. (The 400 rule overrides the 100 rule, apparently.)
A couple cool factoids arise from all this:
1. February is so short because Caesar's son Augustus was a brat, and wanted his month to have as many days as his father's (July), so they rearranged a bunch of days, the end result being that February has fewer days than all the other months.
2. The Russian and Greek Orthodox calendars still use the Julian calendar, so Easter falls later for them than on our (Gregorian) Easter.
3. The whole world didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar at the same time. When it was adopted, 10 days were cut out so they could start fresh. Most of the world cut the 10 days in 1582, but Russia held out until 1918. Alaska cut the 10 days when it was purchased from Russia in 1867. Can you imagine the confusion of losing 10 days? And of having different areas be so off from one another? Think of all the birthdays that got thrown off!
The moral of this post being: Who knew calendars could be interesting and cool? And savor today a little more, cause you won't see it again for a while. :)