Hobby, pursuits and experiments fill a person’s time

I have always had more interests than I was able to find time to pursue, more things to understand better, more books to read, more projects to try, more music to learn, more experiments to work through, and so on and on. There seems not to be time in all of a lifetime to pursue all the things that could be of interest. When I was young I used to imagine myself in various different occupations. I could imagine being a school bus driver, or a tractor driver, or a store proprietor, a preacher, a math teacher, a dairyman and cattleman like my Dad, a crop farmer, a carpenter and builder, a musician, and so on.

When I became a preacher and pastor of churches, my assumptions about my education were kind of turned upside down. I had earlier assumed that the things I was studying in school that would be part of making a living for me would be the mathematics, the agri-shop, the typing and book-keeping classes and so on. As it turned out, the things that were more part of my working life as a minister were the language, literature, history, civics, and so on. The things that I had earlier thought of as the practical essentials became basically hobby pursuits to try to find time for.

One of my long-time interests for hobby pursuit is calendars. I still haven’t done as much study of ancient calendars as I want to do eventually. Recently I have been looking at possibilities for alternative calendars. My interest had been sparked for a calendar that would not have years starting on different weekdays, and a calendar that would have complete weeks rather than always having 52 weeks plus a day or two. I also became interested in looking more precisely at the calendar’s need for a Leap Year, or in the case of our regular Gregorian Calendar, the Leap Day that is added to the calendar approximately every four years. In addition to these interests, I have been very interested in calculation applications that can be built into computer spreadsheets, using Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc or Corel’s Quattro Pro. I found that the spreadsheets can pretty effectively model the regular calendar, so that one can see a calendar for about any selected year by inputting the year number.

So, recently I have been working out some possibilities for calendar alternatives, several of them. All of them have been based on the idea of the year always being made up of full weeks, either 52 weeks (364 days) or 53 weeks (371 days). This of course means that my alternatives would vary from the earth orbit year by a few days more than happens with our regular Gregorian Calendar. When our regular calendar gets ahead of the earth orbit year by nearly a day, a Leap Day is added to the calendar for the year. Rather than having a Leap Day every four years or so, my alternative calendars use a Leap Week to adjust to the fact that the earth orbit year does not have exactly 365 days. The earth orbit year takes nearly 6 hours more than 365 days to complete the year. That is almost one-fourth of a day, and is the reason we add a day to the year about every four years (with a few exceptions).

My first alternative calendar is the most different from our regular calendar.

It has 13 months rather than 12. Every month for normal years would have 28 days — 13 times 28 equals 364 days, which would be the length of common years. Every seven years, a week would be added to one month to make up for the short 364-day years. About every 28 years, an additional week would be added to one month to adjust for the Leap Year need. Every year would begin on a Sunday and end on a Saturday, as would also every month of the year without exception. This alternative would get “off” in relation to the earth orbit year by as much as seven to 12 days. This compares kind of unfavorably to the disparity that our regular calendar develops, which may be as much as one day “off.” Another downside to this alternative calendar is that the special days, the holidays like Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and so on, would not fall on their normal days of the year.

Alternative Calendar 2 might be of greater interest. Number 2 goes back to the 12-month calendar, but with seven months always having 28 days, four months always having 35 days, and one month having 28 days in regular years and 35 days for Leap Years. Leap Years would happen every five or six years. This alternative would vary less from the earth orbit year, at times running as much as three days ahead, and at times as much as three days behind the earth orbit year.

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Editor’s note: This article was originally published June 4, 2008. Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.