I had a lot of fun designing a new calendar for my planet yesterday!! (Wait, is it fun if you're rolling around in frustration and are left with a pounding headache afterward? Answer: Yes.) This was prompted by me being internally confused about the timeline of my story - that is, how my character's personal story matched up with events occurring on a grander scale. In order to line them up properly, I needed to assign dates to things, and in order to assign dates, I needed to come up with a way to tell the passage of time; thus, the New World Calendar was born! (Boring name, I know. I'll fix it later when I can find a proper name for my continents.)

To put it simply, the planet does a full revolution around its sun every 324 days; there are 5 days in a week and four weeks in a month, which makes 16 months a year + four celebration days (one each season). I named each of the months, but to make matters more confusing, I named not only the days, but also each week in the month as well - the names for each of the four weeks is the same across the calendar, but it is still very different from how we name dates. I know that's kind of hard to follow, but maybe I'll give an example anyway. The 160th day of the year would be read as, "Bunday, at the Staunch of Surge," where 'Bunday' is the fourth day of the week, 'Staunch' is the last week of a month, and 'Surge' is the month itself. Luckily the years are straightforward numbers, like 1594 and such. There are also floating 'celebration days' that don't have an official place in the calendar, and rotate every cycle (one cycle = four years). Sooooo, yeah. I confused myself. I have it all worked out in my head now, of course, but inventing it and trying to implement it in the same day was a little much for my brain to wrap itself around at 11 o'clock in the evening. ANYWAY. I know that's not relevant to anyone but myself, but I was excited about it, so I wanted to share (However it opened up a whole new realm of questions about measuring the planet's geologic timescale and the development of time-measuring apparati in historic and modern cultures of the planet...) I love thinking about little details nobody cares about! I just want to be able to say, I HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS TO EVERY QUESTION YOU COULD EVER HAVE ABOUT MY WORLD <--- god-complex

Ahem. On a more realistic note, I'm back from the best vacation ever, and I have been offered another position at the Oceanography Institute! Though the government's lack of funding has been absolutely brutal the past few years, my boss managed to find enough to hire me all summer and for my full 90 day allowance next year. Super excited!! Not only does it involve canoeing and snorkeling in ecological reserves, but it also pays extremely well. I thank my lucky stars that I was able to find something so awesome with the job market as dry as it is right now. A job as good as this one will allow me to do LOTS of world-building - both in real life, and on my own little planet What more could a nerd ask for?

TheMeadiator

P.S. Are there any Fire Emblem fans reading this?? I am a recent convert, addicted to the 3DS Awakening version. HOLY AWESOME.