Good morning. ⏰📅🌎

10 September 2026

I’ve been retired from the military for over 26 years now. It’s strange how fast that time has gone by. I spent 30 years in uniform, and back then it felt like a lifetime — which, I suppose, it was. The passage of time just seemed different then, even though it was still the same old 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year… except for leap years, of course.

Hmm… who came up with leap years?
Whoa — that took a turn I wasn’t expecting.

Leap years were introduced in 45 B.C. as part of a major overhaul of the Roman calendar. Julius Caesar — dictator of Rome and not exactly known for subtlety — consulted with astronomers and set the year at 365 days and 6 hours. To account for those extra hours, he simply added a bonus day every four years. Clean, simple, Roman.

But the Julian calendar wasn’t perfect. It assumed the year was 365.25 days long, and over centuries that tiny difference added up. So in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar — the one we use today. His astronomers calculated the year more precisely at 365.2425 days. Pretty clever for people working 2,000 years ago without computers, satellites, or even decent lighting.

To fix the drift, they added a rule: any year ending in “00” is not a leap year unless it’s divisible by 400. I didn’t know that until this morning, and trying to think through the math makes my head hurt.

Anyway, as I started out saying, time seems to slip by faster than it used to. It reminds me of an old movie scene where the seasons change in rapid succession beneath an opaque calendar flipping through the months — a visual metaphor for how quickly life moves when you’re not paying attention.

“Time moves slowly but passes quickly.” – Alice Walker

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

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