The White Fleet's Landfall, 2nd Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I forgot to mention yesterday that as long as I was coming up with a fantasy calendar, I might as well renumber the years, too. After not a whole lot of consideration, I decided to reset Year 0 from the birth of you-to-who to the year 1500. The peak of the Renaissance, just before the Age of Enlightenment, just after the discovery of the Americas. That seemed as good a point to start a "Modern Era" as any, although I could just as easily have picked 1776 if I was feeling patriotic, or 1954 if I was feeling egotistical. A case can be made for 1619, and 1938 would be a good candidate, too, as it was the year that both nuclear fission and LSD were discovered. This would be the year 88 of a nuclear, psychedelic era. But the math is so much easier converting the current year to my fantasy year with 1500 that it wins, hands down.

I walked an 8.3-mile Van Buren today. Okay, so what does that mean? Last year, I started naming my walks by the U.S. President corresponding to the number of miles after I saw a pledge drive asking people to walk 39 miles in a month in honor of Jimmy Carter, the 39th President. I could knock off 39 miles in a good week, but the  pledge drive made me think which President's number I walked each day. So, a one-mile walk is a Washington, two is an Adams, and so on to 47 being a Stable Genius (he whose name I shall not say). It's silly, but it had the added bonus of finally getting me to memorize the names of all the Presidents, in order. It also made watching the miniseries Death by Lightning more interesting, as I would always get bogged down sometime around the Hayes-Garfield-Arthur sequence (you know, right after the easy Lincoln-Johnson-Grant sequence and before the mnemic-friendly Cleveland-Harrison-Cleveland).