But this blog has a no negativity rule, so I’m challenging myself to write something positive about daylight saving time (as opposed to the ten rotten things I could list if this wasn’t a no complaining zone.) Here I go.

My cats don’t know that we changed our clocks, so they still meow at the same time each morning, but now it is an hour later.

That’s all I’ve got.

Compared to your ancestors, you do. Earth’s rotation is slowing down, so a modern day is about 1.7 milliseconds longer than a day a century ago.

I know that doesn’t sound like much, but when dinosaurs lived, a year was about 370 days long.  Give it another hundred million years, and an Earth year may only be 360 days long.

I’m bringing this up because today is leap day. It might seem like we have a handle on counting time. As long as we add an extra day every four years (but not on century years that aren’t divisible by 400), we’ll never be late.

The truth is, our calendar has to be tweaked often to match the seasons and our trip around the sun. There will never be a time when the calendar is set in stone.

Lucky for humans, this constant change happens so slowly that we can’t tell. But for those who work with super-accurate clocks, leap minutes and leap seconds are as important as leap days.

If I successfully do this, I’ll be impressed. I tend to start projects like this and then stop after the first day. Perhaps if I tell you what I’m doing, you can hold me accountable.

I have mentioned the Before Breakfast podcast before. Laura Vanderkam is a time management expert, and her short, daily podcast provides real-life ideas for making the most of our time. She suggests that people track their time for a week to see how it is actually being used.

It’s easy to say, “I have no time,” but that probably isn’t true. You’re probably spending your time on things that don’t matter to you. One way to find out where your time is going is to write down everything you do for a week. I decided to attempt this because I want to manage my time better.

Laura has a free spreadsheet on her website, so I didn’t have to create my own. (Click here if you want to try this exercise for yourself.) I chose to measure my time in 15-minute chunks. I could have done thirty, but I wanted to be as accurate as possible.

I’ve been recording my time for just a few hours, and I’ve already learned something. I’m a flitter. I flit from task to task, often before anything is finished. For example, while I wrote this blog, I trimmed Hela’s nails, talked to my hubby, answered an email, and changed the kitty litter. I’ve read a lot of self-help books, so I know I’m not being productive. Or maybe I am. I’ll finish the chart and see.

As I stated above, I’m horrible at filling out charts on a long term basis. This is why I don’t record what I eat. I occasionally download a food app and use it for a day or two, and then I forget. I’d like to fill out my time chart for the whole week, so I set my phone timer to ding every half hour. Hopefully, that will keep me going.

If I actually fill out this chart, I’ll let you know what I learned. Ideally, I’ll see where I’m wasting time and make some changes, but that is a whole different focus. Right now, I’m just going to write down my activities. It shouldn’t take too much time.

Every few years, scientists add a leap second to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) so that it matches the rotation of the Earth, which is slowing down. If we didn’t make adjustments to our clocks, we’d be noticably off in a few thousand years.  (Not by a lot, though. When the Chicxulub impactor wiped out the dinosaurs (except for birds,) 66 million years ago, the Earth day was about 23 hours long.)

These leap seconds are rarely added, and no one notices when they are because we don’t measure our day-to-day life that precisely. However, computers do notice, and that is one of the reasons why some scientists think leap seconds shouldn’t be added. It might mess with precise programming.

Other scientists think it is necessary. They have many reasons, including that sundials would never work properly again. Clearly, that’s a big problem.

Leap seconds are added on either June 30th or December 31st. One was scheduled for the end of 2019, but it didn’t happen, so the last one added was in 2016. There probably won’t be one in 2020, but since I couldn’t find the next scheduled one, anything could happen.

I like the idea of a leap second. It makes a lot more sense than Daylight Saving Time.

One of the things I like about the first day of a new year (and I like a lot of things) is a fresh calendar. I usually have four or five calendars in my house, and they are all different. Right now I only have three, but I’ll be buying a couple more once they go on sale (I really want a Star Wars one.)

Calendars are a crazy industry. They can’t be that expensive to make because half the pages on every calendar are the same. It’s not like the calendar companies have to write a book, but calendars cost the same as an 80,000-word novel. Plus, there is a topic for everyone. Dogs, cats, pigs, goats in trees, whatever you want to see on your wall, there’s a calendar for you.

We bought a lot of calendars in Alaska, some for gifts and some for ourselves. Buying a 2020 calendar in August felt weird, but while putting them up yesterday, I was delighted we got them because they’re gorgeous and remind me of our great trip.

We all have calendars on our phones, tablets, and computers. We can connect our digital schedules to others, so no plan gets lost. You’d think wall calendars would be a thing of the past, but there are pop-up stores that just sell calendars. We’ve come into a time when we can have our wall calendar and a digital one too.

Do you have a wall calendar for 2020? Did you pick it, or was it a gift? What topic is it? Do you think wall calendars will ever fall out of favor? I certainly hope not. How can I count down the days to 2021 without one?

One of the hallmarks of time management is learning to say no to things that are not priorities in your life. I believe this is a good idea. Many of us say yes to every volunteer invitation and every urgent request even if it gets in the way of our own plans. We all need to learn that no is not a bad word.

However, yes can be fun if you let it be. Instead of stressing that the laundry won’t get done if you go to the movies, remember that laundry never ends but Christmastime does.

So, during this time of gift-giving, let the little things go and make someone happy by doing whatever crazy thing they want to do. You can practice saying no in 2020.

We use the word all the time, but I never thought to ask where it came from. Then I was listening to the Court Appointed podcast last Monday (everyone should listen to this funny legal show) and was floored to learn that noon came from nona hora, which means the ninth hour.

The ninth hour?

Everyone knows that noon is at midday, the twelfth hour. How did the ninth hour become the twelfth hour?

Actually, it’s a little confusing, but here we go. The Romans counted time starting at sunrise or about 6 a.m., so nona hora was at 3 p.m.

The medieval monks borrowed the Roman time scale. They had to say prayers every three hours, and each prayer time had a name. The one that started at 3 p.m. was called “nona” or noon. In the 12th century, the 3 p.m. prayer was moved back to 12 p.m., and the name of the prayer came with it. Thus the 12 p.m. prayer became known as noon.

By the 14th century, noon and midday were synonymous, and everyone used this word that means nine for the twelfth hour. Crazy.

Check out this website for a more detailed explanation. I thought calling the eleventh month of the year “November” was weird, but this is really out there.

The one thing that the article didn’t explain was why the time for the prayer changed. I mean, the monks were already saying prayers from sun-up to sun-down. Maybe they decided to get up even earlier.

That’s what happened when I read a post about the Bering Strait from Alaska Life.

I know a little about the Bering Strait. I know it’s narrow and separates Russia from Alaska. I know that when sea level dropped, it became a land bridge, thus allowing animals and past humans to populate North America.

When I visited the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in Whitehorse, YT, I learned about all sorts of oversized animals that survived that far north because of a protected area that was not covered in ice.

What I didn’t know is that there are islands in the middle of the Bering Strait. If you want to know about them all, read the Alaska Life article (read it anyway because it has excellent maps.) Today, I want to talk about just a couple of those islands. Big Diomede and Little Diomede.

These two islands are located in the middle of the Bering Strait and are about two miles apart. Big Diomede Island is owned by Russia, and Little Diomede Island is owned by the United States. Since this are the closest point between these two countries, they really can see Russia from their homes.

Nobody lives on Big Diomede Island anymore, but the Russian Military still uses it. About 100 Native Alaskan live on Little Diomede Island.

Here is the most amazing part. The International Date Line goes between the two islands, so Big Diomede is twenty-one hours ahead of Little Diomede. Crazy!!! Big Diomede is sometimes called “Tomorrow Island,” and Little Diomede is called “Yesterday Isle.” That is one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard.

Please read the article to learn more about these remote islands. It’s incredible where people choose to live. If you’re looking to get away from civilization, Alaska is still the place to go. I don’t want to live there, but I’m sure glad I visited.

When I read the heading “Dinosaurs Lived On the Other Side Of the Galaxy,” I assumed it was clickbait nonsense. But then I noticed that it was sent by IFLScience!, so I delved deeper. This heading is both true and misleading, which I suppose is why it works.

Dinosaurs lived on the other side of the galaxy because it takes the Earth 230 million years to orbit our galaxy center. During the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth was on the other side of the galaxy from where it is now.

That is very cool and also very normal. If I go back 115 million years ago from today (when the Earth was opposite where it is now), we end up in the Early Cretaceous, during the age of the dinosaurs. If we go back another 230 million years, another time when the Earth was on the other side of the galaxy, we reach the Carboniferous. We could say that two-foot-long dragonflies lived on the other side of the galaxy.

If we do another rotation, we end up in the Cambrian, when trilobites lived on the other side of the galaxy.

So you see, dinosaurs were not the point of this article, just a sneaky way to get us to learn something. We now know that the Earth (and our entire solar system) rotates the galaxy center in around 230 million years. That’s really cool, but then so are giant dragonflies and trilobites.