calendar
As we move into the new year, we begin to think about how long the year seems…until we look at the year’s end speedily approaching. Then, we realize just how short the year really was, but what if there was a strange “time paradox” that disrupted the “space-time continuum” that we were told about in the movie, Back to the Future? Well, I don’t know if such a “time paradox” could really exist, but in the year 46BC, Julius Caesar did cause a type of disruption in the “space-time continuum” when he decided to revamp the human calendar. Of course, the days went on as usual, but the names of things and the way we looked at them changed. Now, for those of you who hate the whole biannual time change thing…well, this would really blow your body’s natural rhythms out of the water.
It seems rather pretty egotistical to just randomly decide that you needed to change up a whole year, and then name the whole thing after yourself to boot, but the Julius Caesar truly thought of himself as a sort of god, I think. It’s not that the pre-Julian Roman calendar didn’t have its problems, because it did, and maybe Caesar thought he was doing a good thing. Still, in the end, the whole maneuver that occurred in the time frame progressing from 46BC to 45BC (note that until Jesus was born, the time was listed as BC, Before Christ and basically went backward. After his birth, time began to go forward, 1AD, 2AD, 3AD, etc. The term anno Domini is Medieval Latin and means “in the year of the Lord” or the year Christ was born.) caused a good bit of confusion…the kind of confusion that would make the time change seem totally insignificant.
The calendar the Romans used were not without fault. The Romans had to periodically add a leap month every few years to keep the calendar year in sync with the solar year. Unfortunately, they had missed a few with the chaos of the civil wars of the late republic. Now if you think the time change is odd, imagine having July suddenly be in the middle of winter in the northern hemisphere. That’s what was happening due to the missed additional leap months that were not happening. The calendar was obviously not well planned. So, to fix things, Caesar chose to take one year, and make a number of drastic changes designed to “get things back on track” once and for all. Nicknamed “the Year of the Consulship of Caesar and Lepidus” or the year of confusion, 46BC had two extra leap months inserted by Julius Caesar. This was in order to make his newly formed Julian Calendar match up with the seasonal year. In the end, 46BC was 445 days long and is the longest year in human history. Julius Caesar added Mercedonius (23 days) and two other intercalary months (33 and 34 days respectively) to the 355-day lunar year, to recalibrate the calendar in preparation for his calendar reform, which went into effect in 45 BC. Of course, the actual planetary orbit-year remained the same. He couldn’t change that. There were still problems with the calendar, but they probably weren’t quite as significant as the old Roman calendar, which required a manual reset of the year periodically.
The Julian Calendar would remain the standard in the western world for over 1600 years, until superseded by the Gregorian Calendar in 1582. The Gregorian calendar that is still widely used today. It is a solar calendar that was first introduced in 1582 by the Catholic Church and replaced the Julian calendar. The Gregorian 
calendar is used for non-religious administration around the world and has been adopted by 168 countries as their official calendar. The principal change was to space leap years differently so as to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long. For church functions, the church calendar is in place, and the Jewish people use the Hebrew calendar. I’m sure there are nations that use some other form of calendar, but the Gregorian calendar seems to keep the seasons aligned with the calendar pretty well.
With so much technology these days, the things that we used to do the old-fashioned way have begun to get lost in the annals of time. Some things, it seems to me would fall into the category of “good riddance,” while others fall into the category of “how sad.” I know that many people would disagree with me, but I have very little use for old-fashioned books. I know that is an odd one, but once you have read the book, how many people will go back and read it again…even the classics. Maybe a few people will, but with so many books to read, most will not. That is why e-books and audible books make perfect sense to me.
A physical calendar is another thing that seems unnecessary to me, although I do like the pictures many of them have. The thing is that writing your schedule on a physical calendar is only helpful if you are where the calendar is. You might suggest a daily planner, but that still requires you to look at it periodically, and let’s face it. Time flies, especially during the workday. If you forget to look at that calendar, you miss your appointment. 
The calendar on your phone, which as we all know is always with you, comes with a reminder that alerts you when it’s time to go to your appointment. Life is hectic, and I just don’t need the added stress of missing appointments, even now that I’m retired.
I have gone shopping with a paper list, and I’m sure you have too. I have also gone to the store and forgotten my list. Then I spent my who shopping experience trying to remember what was on my list. I’ll be honest I don’t always shop with a list of any kind, but when I really need to remember something, a list is essential. Once again, I go back to my phone, because there is a note app on my phone, and you can even get an app specifically for groceries. That’s where I put the really important things, because I always have my phone with me…don’t you? You do, because really…nobody has a landline anymore.
While my dear uncle, Bill Spencer always wanted to get a letter from his loved ones, and I can totally understand why, after looking at some of the letters from my dad to his mom, from my uncle to me, and from ancestors I never met to other ancestors I never met. The point is, as my uncle put it that you can actually see their handwriting. That is truly a precious thing to have. I suppose that if I have one “old-fashioned” thing that 
I could go both ways with letters would be that thing. Those handwritten letters are precious, but daily communication received quickly via text, messenger, or snap chat are very important to me too. When you have children who live far away, or as we all do, children who are very busy, those quick little messages are a great treasure. I think I will always treasure both.
When your children move away, you look forward to every trip they make home. The further the distance from their home to yours, the longer the time between visits. For our daughter, Amy Royce, that means almost a year since she was last in Casper. Bob and I have been out there, but our daughter, Corrie Petersen and her family have not. For them it has been a full year since they saw Amy. Corrie is no stranger to having a loved one living away from home, because her son, Chris Petersen, has been living in Sheridan, Wyoming, going to college for two years now. He graduates this year, but has decided to stay in Sheridan. We miss him very much, and love it every time he comes home…which thankfully, is more often than Amy and her family are able to. Nevertheless, this is the first time in her life that it has been a year since Corrie last saw her sister, and it has been hard. I think that in reality, it doesn’t matter who you are, when your loved one is far away, it is an emotional time.
As I said, we have all been looking forward to having Amy home for a week. She has made the trip for my grandson, her nephew, Chris Petersen’s college graduation, so it is time to celebrate both events. She will also be visiting with her friends here in town too, and I know that they are all excited about that. Her event calendar is very full already, and finding time to squeeze everything in gets more complicated by the minute, but…Amy’s coming home…so we will deal with the rest. A complicated schedule is minor in the grand scheme of things, and I suppose I do have to share her with her friends…at lease a little bit.
I think that the person who has probably had the most difficult time…here anyway, is my granddaughter, Shai. Yes, she has been to Washington to see her family several times, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are 
so far away, and she misses them so much. Shai and I work together, and I have walked up to her desk several times to find her wiping away a tear. It broke my heart, because I can’t stand to see one of my kids or grandkids hurting so much. Of course, with her move to Washington coming up quickly, those tears of missing her family will be gone, and while I will miss her terribly, I know in my heart that is is best for her, so I’ll be happy for her. And in reality, while my kids and grandkids might move away, I know that they know the way back home, so they will all be coming home now and then.
A couple of weeks ago, my brother-in-law, Ron gave his dad, my father-in-law a calendar from 2012 that he had used at work…not for the calendar but for the pictures. They were all pictures of tractors through the years. We all took a look at that calendar, because it was interesting to see how much tractors had changed over the years, and the different makes for that matter. I remember seeing one that could have easily passed for a travel trailer, were it not for the tractor wheels. And there were makes that even my father-in-law hadn’t heard of, and having grown up on ranches, I would have expected that he would know them all.
Since the Industrial Revolution, which occurred from 1760 to somewhere between 1820 and 1840, when manufacturing transitioned from hand production to machines, technology never stops changing. There are always new ideas, and someone to invent them. I recalled seeing a couple of pictures among the old pictures I have been going through, that showed a couple of different tractors used by members of Bob’s and my families. Even though these pictures probably weren’t taken that far apart in years, the two tractors are very different from one another. I suppose that the tractors themselves could have been much different in age, since you often use a machine for many years before it wears out, and they could have been for different work, thereby requiring different designs, but I was struck, nevertheless, by the vast difference in their design. My father-in-law also told me that it could depend on the area of the country, as to what makes of tractor were available. That makes sense too, in that different climates, and growing seasons might require different types of wheels and designs. I suppose that humidity could play a part in 
how the engines ran as well, and so could affect what tractor make would work better in those areas.
Technology is changing so fast these days that tractors may one day be obsolete, you never know. I mean…who ever thought there would be a vacuum cleaner that cleaned by itself, and yet now we have them. I don’t mean to say that crops will ever harvest themselves, or that the ground will just stay plowed, but one day there might be a machine that does those jobs with just a little bit of programing. Then, like the Roomba, which is no longer called a vacuum, the tractor might change its name with the modern advancement of automation too.
