Back of the Driver's Neck, 4th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): I'm 100% convinced no one would have noticed, but I made some more changes to my New Revised Universal Solar Calendar. For the record, I called yesterday the 64th day of Childwinter, and although Childwinter had 73 days, I'm calling today the 4th of Spring. 

The weather's springlike outside today. I walked an 8.4-mile Van Buren this afternoon in 78° weather wearing a t-shirt and shorts. Somewhere up in doggie heaven, Cricket is wagging his tail because the Stable Genius fired Kristi Noem today. And just about everybody is realizing that the U.S. war in Iran is purposeless with no clear goals or exit strategy. But those aren't the reasons I modified the calendar.

Following the Discordian calendar, the New Revised USC divided the year into five seasons instead of 12 months. But there are 366 days in a full year (what you would call a "leap year") and 366 isn't evenly divisible by five, so the seasons didn't all have the same number of days. 

My problem with the 12-month Julian calendar was that every year started and ended on a different day of the week. Holidays and celebrations tied to a specific day of a month would fall on different weekdays each year and even the "fourth Monday" holidays would fall on different days of the month (and don't even get me started on Easter). But a calendar of 366 days divided into 61 six-day weeks always begins on the first day of the week and always ends on the last. In the USC, at least the earlier version, Independence Day, your July 4, the 186th day of a leap year, would always fall on the fifth day of a six-day week, and would always be the 40th day of Summer. 

But a few things about my calendar still bugged me. There was that extra, "rounding error" day in Autumn, and it also felt that even the other 73-day seasons were still too long. Also, "Autumn" began too early (August 7), at least here in Georgia, as did the end-of-year winter season (October 20).

So instead of five Discordian seasons, I've revised the calendar to evenly divide the year into six 61-day seasons. I've kept Angus MacLise's terms "Childwinter" and "Hagwinter" for the seasons at the beginning and end of the year, as well as the names "Spring" and "Autumn." But in my Newest Revised USC, there are now two separate 61-day summer seasons, Midsommar, roughly equivalent to May and June and which contains the summer equinox, and Hundstage, German for "Dog Days," roughly equivalent to July and August. Yes, I took "Midsommar" from the movie (and what of it?) and the German "Hundstage" seemed to fit better with the Swedish name before it than actually calling it Dog Days. 

So the year is now evenly divided into 61 six-day weeks, and into the six 61-day seasons of Childwinter, Spring, Midsommar, Hundstage, Autumn, and Hagwinter.

Old Angus MacLise gave each day of the year its own poetic name (today's is "Back of the Driver's Neck," which may not sound particularly poetic isolated like that but it works in context, trust me) and I generally kept the names in the order he assigned them. But I noticed that there were six groups of names randomly scattered throughout the year where the names were each repeated five times (e.g., Day of the Zenith, Second Day of the Zenith, and so on to Fifth Day of the Zenith), so I moved some around so each of the six seasons had one "theme" week. 

MacLise also had some paired but not sequential names, such as "Day of Quest" and "Last Day of Quest," scattered throughout the year. I moved those pairs to the first and last days of my seasons, so that.Spring began three days ago with "Day of the Western Isles" and will end after 61 days with "Last Day of the Western Isles." Midsommar begins with "Establishment of the Dreamweapon" and ends with "Launching of the Dreamweapon." Hundstage starts with "Dog Days Begin" and concludes with "Dog Days End" (another reason that I call the season Hundstage and not Dog Days is to avoid confusion between those two specific days and the larger season). "First Day of Quest" and "Last Day of Quest"  are the first and last days of Autumn. The two winter seasons both start and end with random names following MacLise's nomenclature.  

But as I said, I doubt anyone would notice and I suspect fewer care. But long story short, I was sick of winter and that weird albino Childwinter avatar, so we're now four days into Spring in my Newest Revised USC.

Welcome to Spring.