Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Monthly money begging post

So, funny story, I didn't have one of these last month because I was too busy panicking about not having money to do the regularly scheduled begging for money post.  I did have several non-regularly scheduled one.

So, this is kind of redundant because I've been begging regularly.  The situation remains the same:
Upside: I will not starve, I still have healthcare, I still have an income.
Downside: New income is $200 a month less than before.  I was barely surviving before.  One of the first indications of what this means is that next month I need to pay $650 that I do not have.
 So the need for money is as scary and immediate as ever.  Thankfully it's much smaller than when the boiler broke.  If I had boiler replacement money then that $200 month hole would be filled for the next two and a half years.

My point is, things are no less dire, but the scale is much, much smaller.

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I usually talk about the month too.

Aprilis was originally the second month of the year and had 30 days.  Adding January and February involved taking days from certain other months.  Aprilis, now the fourth month, had 29 days.  That marks it as a short month.

As high priest, Julius Caesar gave April it's 30th day back.  Since his reforms added days after the ides, the ides of April remain on the 13th day of the month.

Today is ante diem xvii Kalendas Maias (17 days, inclusive, before the start of May.)

The Romans themselves didn't know where the name of April came from.  One theory they had is that it's related to a verb meaning to open.  Thus April is when things bloom, or some such.

6 comments:

  1. You have said you don't like leaving the top post as a money-related one for too long. So is there a way to pin the last post with other content to the top after a couple of days? (Knows nothing about Blogger)

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    1. I did a quick google and this link came up:
      http://oscarmini.com/2014/06/blogger-sticky-post.html

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  2. Is April still around the same time of the year as it was before January and February were added? I guess that makes sense, but it never occurred to me to wonder how adding months affected the scheduling of the other months.

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    1. It's more or less the same place where it was. There was a month-less period that January and February replaced, but it wasn't quite long enough to put two months there, hence taking days from other months.

      With no leap day yet the calendar wasn't anchored as firmly. When things got too far off the high priest was supposed to declare a special month. That... didn't work.

      Julius Caesar revised the calendar because it had drifted a lot.

      The modern calendar was revised because it drifted 3/4 of a day every century. It wasn't reset to the original though, but to when Christian feast days were determined. Still, it should only be, at most, a few days off the original April.

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    2. ...the existence of a month-less period never occurred to me. It makes sense, though - the exact date doesn't matter most of the time, and in winter (no farming) I imagine it mattered very little at all. Thanks for the explanation!

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