Tag: Leap Day

I’ve never met anyone born on Leap Day, but a friend of mine and his twin brother came really close. My friend John was born on February 28, 1956. A few hours later and he would have been celebrating his 16^th birthday today instead of having celebrated his 64^th yesterday. In actuality, the odds of being born on Leap Day are 1 in 1,461.

Leap Day happens almost every four years. Did you notice I said “almost”? Years that end in “00” but aren’t divisible by 400 don’t have a Leap Day. Most of us will never see it in our lifetime. The last time this happened was the year 1900. We won’t skip Leap Day again until the year 2100.

So why the weird finagling with the calendar? We know the earth orbits the sun approximately every 365¼ days. It’s this “approximately” that messes us up. The real number is 365.242189. So if we skip Leap Day three times every 400 years, we hit it right on.

A few other fun facts about Leap Day:

1. People born on Leap Day are called “leaplings” or “leapers.” In Hong Kong, the legal birthday of a leapling is March 1. In New Zealand, it’s February 28.

2. There’s a club for people born on February 29—The Honor Society of Leap Year Babies. The club has more than 10,000 members worldwide.

3. One in five engaged couples in Greece will avoid marrying during a leap year because they believe it’s bad luck.

4. In Finland, it’s supposed to be good luck for a woman to propose on Leap Day. If her boyfriend refuses her proposal, he is required to pay her a fine—enough fabric to make a skirt.

5. In Ireland, the man who refuses a Leap Day proposal must buy her a silk gown.

6. And there’s a movie about it. In the 2010 romantic comedy Leap Year, a woman travels to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend on Leap Day, which tradition says he has to accept.

So, ladies, if you’ve gotten tired of your special someone to propose, today’s your day. For everyone else, however you choose to celebrate this holiday that comes around only once every four years, have fun!

Zorro here. It’s Zaturday! Well, it’s actually Zurzday. Ziggy and I are having to do our Zaturday post two days early. Mommy says we got preempted. I don’t know that word, but supposedly this Zaturday is a special day. Mommy says it’s Leap Day. What makes it special is that it only comes once every four years. That means the last Leap Day happened before I was even born. And Ziggy was so little, he wouldn’t remember it.

Weruva Hmm, if it’s a really special day, maybe Mommy and Daddy will do something extra nice for us (nicer than the normal stuff). Like maybe they’ll give us some extra food and pour tuna juice over it.

Or put some more catnip in our toy.

Right now, Mommy is working on her computer. She does that a lot. I don’t mind, though, because she usually lets me sleep in her lap or curl up on a chair next to her. Sometimes Ziggy jumps up on the table and runs across the computer while Mommy is typing. That puts funny things on her screen and she yells at him.

I wish she would let me play on the keyboard, but she always closes the lid when she gets up. She does that because of Midnight, an old kitty we had when Mommy first adopted me. Mommy left her computer open when she and Daddy went out for dinner. (They fed us before they left. Mommy’s good that way. In fact, she always feeds Ziggy and me before she eats.)

Black cat Okay, back to the computer story. When it got later and Mommy and Daddy still weren’t home, Midnight decided to play on Mommy’s computer. I told him not to, but he did it anyway. I guess he figured he didn’t have to listen to me because he was a lot more mature.

I stayed as far away as I could, because I didn’t want to get blamed. When Mommy and Daddy got home, Midnight was still on the table, lying next to the computer. Mommy ran over, shooed him off the table and checked what she’d been working on. I could tell by her reaction that Midnight had messed it up. I don’t understand everything he did, but Mommy did a Facebook post talking about it. Here’s what she said:

While I was enjoying dinner, Midnight was making changes to my current manuscript. He added several lines of gibberish, deleted some of the stuff I had written, moved chunks of text around, then did a “save as” (F12), naming the file “kkk.” (Probably stands for “kitty-kitty-kitty.”) Fortunately, I had track changes turned on, so I was able to reject everything the cat had done.

Mommy hasn’t left her computer open since. So Ziggy and I have to find other ways to get into trouble. Ziggy is better at that than I am.

Leap Day – Fun Facts

It’s Zaturday – A Furry Computer Hacker!