Today is Leap Day! Which means there are only 306 days before the end of the year! ( And only 299 days of Christmas Shopping left!! Sorry...couldn't help myself)
You do realize this means an opportunity for a special postmark right? Well, not like a pictorial cancel..though there may be some..I haven't checked yet. But just the date will be neat to have on a piece of mail. There will be about ten of you that will get a Leap Day 2/29/2012 from me. =) Will you be sending any out?
So why do we have leap years? Well, the short answer is this. It takes approximately 365 days 6 hours to make one orbit of the sun. But adding 6 hours into the calendar each year is not easily done. SO, in the roman times they devised a way of adding a day each 4 years to the calendar. Which used to be February 24, except that in the Middle Ages we adopted the calendar numbering system that is still used today..which results in February 29.
Leap day should not be confused with Leap second which is the adding or subtracting of a second due to a change in rotational speed of the earth. The next leap second will be added on June 30 of this year. Woohoo! We are picking up a second folks! Mark your calendars! That is one more second we can use to write letters. =)
What will you do with your Leap Day?
That is a great idea to get a special postmark today -- but I notice many (many) of the envelopes I receive in the mail are not postmarked at all. Lots of the stamps are not cancelled -- or they are just scribbled on with a pen or marker.....
ReplyDeleteI notice the same thing- no postmark at all. (You can use the stamps again). I sent one thing out today...we'll see what happens.
ReplyDeleteI went to the post office to mail a handful of things. I bought stamps with a clutch of new mail stashed in my bag. So excited, I forgot to mail the outgoing letters! Plus . . . They call me by my first name now! It's so distracting. :) I know how Candi Staton must feel every time she hears One Eskimo sing that song!
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