Thursday, September 17, 2015

I said I'd give a tally for the money begging thing

House + Dentist expenses ≈ $800.  (I don't have the figures for that in front of me at the moment.  I think it's a little bit less than $800.)

The class I'm taking so that I can keep my mental health care: $917.00.

Expected late fee because I was supposed to pay that the moment I signed up on account of the semester already having started: $50

Health fee because you have to be full time to get the university psychologist and the off site psychiatrist completely covered by tuition (though it's still almost entirely covered): $80

Washing machine: unknown.  At this point any attempt to fix it would be a long shot, and the most obvious one is ... crap, I don't have that information in front of me at the moment.  Over a hundred with no assurance that the repair would help so it might be better to just buy a new one.

So, current "Oh my god, the sky is falling!" figure is approximately equal to $1,847+washing machine.

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I usually talk about the month in money begging posts, so:

September was originally the seventh month of a ten month year, hence the name.  It had 30 days.

Numa thought that there shouldn't be this big period without a month so he added two months to the front, which is why September is now the ninth month.  He also seems to have had a thing for odd numbers, so he reduced the days of September to 29.

Numa's calendar still didn't have the right number of days in a year and thus necessitated a leap month being added every two or three years (two years and the calendar was too long, three and it was too short), which was done at the discretion of the pontifex maximus (the high priest.)

By the time of Julius Caesar the entire thing was well out of whack, so Caesar, himself the high priest, proposed the less fucky Julian Calendar, though it wasn't until after he had been stabbed to death that it was actually implemented.  The Julian calendar replaced the idea "We'll have a leap month every so often" with "We'll have a leap day every four years" and made it work by lengthening various months.*  September got its 30th day back.

The Julian Calendar only had one day of drift every 400 years, so the Gregorian Calendar (which replaced it) didn't need to tinker with September to fix it.

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* And Caesar, not being Numa, added the new stuff to the end rather than the beginning, but since we don't talk about the names for days that much anymore it doesn't really matter to us when the days were added.  If we still gave a damn about when the ides fell, though, then it would matter to us.

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