A year is a warm fuzzy measurement of time for us. We measure our age in years. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries on the same day each year. When the number of years which have lapsed since we were deemed fully educated by some school somewhere are evenly divisible by five or ten, we get back together with the people who received their diplomas at the same time and make snide remarks about the ones who've gotten fat.

Somehow, we've grown sentimental about Earth being in exactly the same place in relation to the sun as it was at the time some memorable event in the past took place. On my daughter's birthday this year, for example, I happened to look at my watch at exactly the same time as the time she was born, and I thought, "Eight years ago at this exact minute, I was watching her be born." I was wrong, though, and I knew better.

Here's the stupid thing, the thing we forget. A year isn't really 365 days.

In reality, it takes the Earth 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.54 seconds - what's called a "sidereal year" - to make one complete trip around the sun.

The problem is that a sidereal year isn't evenly divisible by 24 hours. Earth's spin on its axis is about one-quarter turn away from true each year to be completely synchronous with one complete orbit of the sun. And that sucks if you're trying to create an accurate calendar that's useful to the common man.

So, we did what we humans do best when we can't figure something out. We fudged it.

The calendar we use today was first devised by an Italian named Aloysius Lilius. He came up with the idea of basing the calendar on daily rotations of the Earth, and then fudged it by declaring that an extra day should be stuck in there every four years to make up for the difference.

It made enough sense to the head guy in charge at the time, the Pope, that it became official. Of course, the Pope, being the head guy in charge, also decided that he'd name it after himself instead of the guy who thought it up, so it's now known as the Gregorian Calendar, after Pope Gregory XIII. Pissed at having someone take credit for his work, Lilius then proposed that they should stick an extra Pope in after every IV popes to make the Catholic church make sense, but that didn't fly.

I just made that last bit up.

So why in the world would I pick today to write a post like this?

It's sentimentality time, for me. Exactly one sidereal year before I started writing this - the last time the Earth was in this exact position in relation to the sun - I was climbing in my car for the ten hour drive to be with my brother, who had just been diagnosed with the cancer which would ultimately claim his life.

Rough day, here.