Solíteir Standard Time

Sunday, May 6, 2021 S.S.

(Or as the rest of the world sees it, Friday, April 28, 2021)

Good afternoon, everyone!

       I just realized you might not be reading this in the afternoon. However, I’ve also decided that I don’t care. It’s afternoon for me, and so I shall greet you thus.

       I don’t start school for another two weeks, so I don’t have much to talk about. In addition, I’m not working today, and I don’t have anywhere to go. Whenever this happens I typically head down the rabbit hole of the internet.

       It started today while setting up my new planner for school. I needed to find a calendar conversion. (For those of you who don’t know, Solíteir has a different calendar than the rest of the world.). I needed to know if this is a leap year (it’s not) and I made the mistake of looking at the history of why the changes were made to the calendar. So, instead of me telling you how I am, I’m going to teach a little history. You can infer how I’m doing from that. Good Luck.

Today’s topic is My Weird New Country:  The Calendar

       Have you ever looked at the seven days of the week and thought, ‘Ugh, that’s just too many days’? Well, in 1429 Harold Finfast did and he went to his friend King Edmund the Wise and convinced him to drop a day from each week.  Not that they needed to rename the days of the week, or they should take a good hard look at the calendar to make some logical improvements. He simply didn’t like Wednesdays. So out they went. To correct the number of days in a year they went to 60 weeks per year instead of 52.

       Okay, that’s fine. It’s a five-day work week with one day off for temple worship. But then, in 1531, there was a solar eclipse. The whole country freaked out for about four hours, and the results were less than rational.  In the aftermath, King Gustave the IV declared God was angry with the people. Thus, they must have a week of repentance. No work or commerce was to be conducted for five days. On the sixth day a new year would begin. (Apparently that’s all it would take for everyone to be perfectly pious…. Let’s see how that turned out.)  This “Holy Week” is still celebrated every winter for five days (or six days during a leap year) with the last day being New Year’s Eve. While it’s still referred to as Holy Week, the official term is the Inter Annum.

       Yes, you read that correctly. There are five days between one year and the next that are not part of either year. They have their own counting system which started in 1531. So, at the end of this year, 2021, we will have the five days of IA 490. When it’s a leap year, like it will be in 2024, they don’t add it to February. They just have an extra day of Inter Annum that way each year has exactly the same number of days. (Which I think, rather begrudgingly, is easy to remember.)

       As the Great Reformation of the 1650s blossomed, so did the amazing thinker and man who required too much control over his environment, Eric Pelton. (Most of you know him as the father of that beastly grade school torture known as Abstract Maths.) Mr. Pelton looked at the calendar and decided it wasn’t enough to just get rid of Wednesdays or to add time in-between the years. There needed to be order and logic, and it didn’t matter if it threw commerce and rational thought out the window. He convinced the Ministry of Science that each month should contain exactly 30 days, the year 60 weeks, and the Inter Annum would end with a leap day as necessary. Fine, whatever.

       But it wasn’t enough to just change the length of the months (because let’s face it, most of the people were not literate enough to know that April had 30 days while May had 31) no, he insisted that the Inter Annum should start on a significant day, like the Winter Solstice…ish. The poor guy couldn’t catch a break. Depending on where you are in the world or even in the country, the solstice technically happens at different times during different planet rotations. So, in Equestria it’s usually on the 20^th of December, but it might be on the 21^st or, even in rare cases, the 19^th.

       Eric Pelton couldn’t handle the variations, so he decreed that the equinoxes and solstices would occur on the same date every year, regardless of when the actual astrological shift occurred. His reasoning? “God abides by order and logic and not by the whimsy of nature.” And that is a direct quote from his essay, “The Divine Nature of Clock and Calendar.” (Available now at your local Library….Yeah, that rabbit hole I fell down included a trip the library for more research. Sue me.)

       If you have made it this far into the dry topic of calendars … Congratulations! But you probably wonder what this has to do with anything. Well, in Equestria, where I was born, we follow Global Standard Time. I was born on Wednesday, March 6, 1998, but in Solíteir I was born on Saturday, March 11^th of the same year.

       So, let’s say a baby is born on February 29^th, 2004 G.S. (which is a leap day in the standard calendar.) In Solíteir, they would no longer have to choose to celebrate their birthday February 28^th or March 1^{st ,} and not just because February has 30 days, but because the day of their birth is March 6^th in Solíteir. (The proper day to celebrate a leap day birthday is March 1^st and I will die on that hill.)  However, if you were born on December 26, 1996 in Equestria, then you would suddenly have a leap day birthday in Solíteir, and your birth date would be Inter Annum 465, Day 6 – the Fools day.

       If you never interact with the outside world, then this is all fine and dandy. But for me, or for anyone who communicates with anyone in the outside world, it’s a pain in the butt.  Now that I think about it, maybe Solíteir just swapped one version of confusion for another. Why can’t we all just use the same version of confusion? Does Solíteir really need to be special in this along with everything else? (I made the mistake of asking Jeremy, the librarian who helped me find the correct Pelton Essay, and he had several rude words to say about the Global Standard Calendar and how illogical it was. According to him, yes Solíteir really does need to be special because he is special and he lives there. I just nodded my head…. Yes…Special.)

       This blog (along with the entire internet) automatically uses the global standard, but I have to date these posts with the Solíteirian Standard (SS) so I don’t get confused. I once missed class because I was busy doing research online and thought it was Wednesday. I don’t have class on Wednesdays … because they don’t have Wednesdays! My poor planner has both date systems written in so I know what’s going on around the world as well as at home.

       I never thought that I would miss Wednesdays but I would trade my my whole kitchen for Solíteir to switch to Global Standard Time.

 

All My Love and all my Wednesdays,

Inga