My wife called me "calendar boy", and it stuck.
Back when the earth was cooling in the 1960s, I discovered a sort of passion for clocks and calendars. I used to draw my own full-year calendars by hand. The internet wasn't even a twinkle in Al Gore's eye yet, and computers were big things that filled buildings. No, I mean I drew them on paper by hand. All twelve months at a time. All 365 days (366 for leap years). To keep from getting too bored by the repetitiveness, I came up with "tricks", such as doing a COLUMN at a time rather than a row. So, all the Tuesdays from January-June, for example.
It didn't take me long to inadvertently memorize the columns. 5-12-19-26. 3-10-17-24-31. Etc. I can do it in my sleep now. It also didn't take me long to notice that, if a month has 31 days, the next month starts three weekdays later. So if a January begins on a Tuesday, the following February begins on a Friday. It's two weekdays for a 30-day month. That combined with the ever-helpful poem beginning "Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November" taught me all I needed to know about designing a calendar for a given year.
Most years start one weekday later than the previous year (it's two days later if the previous year was a leap year), A helpful corrolary is the fact that the entire calendar cycle repeats itself every 28 years. This year (2010) began on a Friday and was two years after a leap-year. 28 years ago (1982) not only ALSO began on a Friday, but was also two years after a leap-year. Put it all together, and there is enough information here to determine the weekday of any given date. What day of the week did D-Day fall on? Let's see, that would be June 6, 1944. Well, the 6th of this month (July 2010) was a Tuesday (I know because the Fourth of July was a Sunday this year). June is a 30-day month (see poem) so June 6 was two weekdays earlier than Tuesday--Sunday. 28 years earlier than 2010 was 1982, and 28 years prior to that was 1954, so we know June 6 was also a Sunday that year. 10 years earlier than that would be ten weekdays earlier, or an entire week plus 3 weekdays earlier EXCEPT for the fact that two leap-year days fall in that interim as well, making it 5 weekdays earler. 5 weekdays earlier than Sunday is Tuesday. Bingo! June 6, 1944 was a Tuesday.
See, anyone can do it. The trick is caring enough to actually do the math. That's my power.
This is my excuse to start a blog. It's not always going to be ONLY about calendars. I like comic books a lot, so I may talk about them. I'm pretty heavily opinionated politically, and while I don't want to alienate anyone immediately in my first blog post, my leanings will become clear fairly shortly. I'm also an amateur writer, so this blog exists for its own sake as an outlet for that writer persona. It will evolve into whatever its going to be on its own.
But there'll always be room for calendar stuff.
