Are you old enough to remember when Labor Day was the start of Fall?
I've noticed, from my lurking in the Blogosphere, that school seems to start earlier in the South than it does here in Chicago -- I gather that a lot of kids are already back to school there.
Why?
But even in Chicago, the start of school is creeping up the calendar, squeezing out the Dog Days. Youngest Son starts football practice -- officially -- this week. Classes start next week. And boxes and bags are already starting to accumulate in the living room as the collegians prepare to move out. Two weeks from now Middle Son and Younger Daughter will both be in class.
It seems like only yesterday we were watching baseball.
Actually... it was Saturday. Middle Son pitched a complete game on Saturday afternoon, giving up only two unearned runs. (He seems genuinely puzzled why Long Suffering Spouse and I try and get to his Summer games. The ones in the "Spring" -- you know, when it's 40 degrees and the light drizzle is mixed with snow flakes -- are more important. But we can get to games played on the weekend in the Chicago area... games played in Wisconsin on a Tuesday afternoon, for example, are another matter entirely.)
In the time of Julius Caesar the Roman calendar had drifted months out of sync with the actual seasons. Caesar reformed the calendar to realign the seasons with the appropriate months; his reformed calendar worked well enough until Pope Gregory XIII added the refinements we still use today.
It is no longer the calendar that is out of alignment with the seasons... we are.
1 comment:
My boys are in their second week of school already. There are so many "breaks" during the year, school starts earlier and earlier.
The teachers apparently wanted a break in the fall, so we have "Fall Break", which is a week! Add to that the conference week before that which is half day every day, "Winter Break" (two weeks) and "Spring Break" and and we've got a lot of time off during the year.
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