Day 365, Year 6: A Year Is Not Always 365 Days
Date: Monday, October 24, 2011
Weather: Mostly Sunny, Temps in the Upper 50’s
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
According to Wikipedia, a year is the orbital period of the Earth moving around the Sun. The Julian year is a unit of time defined as 365.25 days, and therefore we put in an extra day in our 365 day year every four years which we call Leap Year. A calendar year in the Gregorian calendar, as well as in the Julian calendar, has either 365 or 366 days. We have a seasonal year, a fiscal year, and an academic year and those years closely approximate the calendar year. But if you lived on another planet, your year would be however many days long it takes that planet to orbit the sun. Our planet is Windbird so there are Voyage of Windbird (VOW) years. These are “cruising years” and they have varied greatly. Windbird’s first world cruising year was 422 days long. That’s how long it took us to complete our “orbit” from Boston to New Zealand. VOW’s second year was 283 days. Year 3 was only 169 days long, while Year 4 was 175 cruising days. Year 5 was another long one at 362, and this, Year 6, is going to be more than 365 days. We will start a new year when we move Windbird to her winter home in couple of weeks, so even though we have hit the magic number of 365 today, we aren’t going into the next year quite yet. We have always started our years at the beginning of the sailing season and ended them when the sailing season came to a close. So we will just continue that cycle even though we are not doing long-distance cruising in the upcoming year.
Mark left early this morning to make his 11:30 am appointment at Mass General Hospital. He was supposed to have a stent put in between the bladder and the urethra to see if that would open things up a bit and allow him to urinate without using a catheter. But when he got there and the doctor found out he was on his way to a conference in Springfield, plans changed. Evidently Mark needs to stay in Boston a few hours after this procedure to see if it works. Whether it works or not, the stent will need to be removed at the end of the day by the doctor. Unfortunately, Mark didn’t know this, so now he will have to go back next Monday and plan to hang out in Boston for the day. Since that day is Halloween, Mark is thinking ‘Trick or Treat.’ If the stint works, it’s a treat. If it doesn’t, it will be a trick. If it works, he will then have what I call the rotor-router procedure done to permanently open up the passage. That will be done on a different day. If it doesn’t work, it’s business as usual self-catheterizing five to six times in a 24-hour period. So stay tuned until next Monday to see what he finds out.
I got truly disappointing news this afternoon. Evidently the data on my external hard drive that failed on Friday morning is not recoverable. I am truly devastated because there were so many files on that drive that exist no where else representing a huge number of hours. I guess I’ll just have to start over, but what a bummer. We still haven’t heard the prognosis on the two computers that they are checking for us, my IBM ThinkPad and our Sony Vaio. Maybe we’ll luck out and end up with at least one of those computers working. In the meantime, we will both continue to use Mark’s Acer that has a whole set of problems of its own. But at least it is working for now.
