236.366 - 2016 project and calendars

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

calendars

ooooo!  calendars!  like the Mayan calendar that we've already overrun!  or the Aztec calendars, one with 365 days and one with 280 days per year.  the perhaps oldest calendar, in Scotland, twelve pits and an arc.  when I was little, I understood that someone or some group in the Middle East had developed a calendar and everyone used it, then the Egyptians came along with a better calendar and so on.  this appears to have been an oversimplification or just a misunderstanding.  apparently the early Middle East had as many calendars as cities.  but anyway, calendars.  they are our way to bring the kind of orderliness we see in the night sky into human affairs, except humans don't have much orderliness, and it turns out the skies won't follow anything we have devised so far.  darn those old stars and planets and the moon anyway!  but through convolutions of astronomers and emperors and popes, we arrived at a pretty good compromise, such that the calendar corresponds to the seasons fairly well, year after year.  whew.  but those weren't the calendars I really meant, they're the background for the calendars some of us use today, the ones on our computers or smart phones.  they are so handy!  you don't want to do the laundry today?  put it off til tomorrow.  the calendar lets you, even helps you.  on mine, I just drag an event to the right and Google does the rest.  if I have a poetry event scheduled for Saturday afternoon and need to move it to Tuesday night, it's a little more work but not much.  they are so damned convenient!  I can schedule an event for every Monday of every week, or the third Wednesday of every month, or the last Sunday of every month.  I can look up the solstices and the equinoxes.  I can check on the phase of the moon or whether we have a leap-second coming.  an extension will show me what the night sky would look like if I could just see it.  computer calendars are the best!  if you don't have a computer yet, you should get one just to be dazzled by what your calendar can do!  happy scheduling!