Today is the last day of February. It’s only 28 days into the month, and it’s already over.
We’re so used to this happening every year, this abnormally short month, that most people probably don’t even think about it. The other 11 months are normal (where “normal” means having 30 or 31 days), so why is February so special? It’s frustrating. You pay more per day for your monthly mortgage or rent payment because of the shorter month. You have fewer days where you can get stuff done.
There are seven months with 31 days. That’s more than half of the months in a year with an extra day over the 30-day months. If just two of them gave up a day and donated it to February, all months would have 30 or 31 days. Isn’t that way better? Isn’t equality what mankind strives for? And this whole leap day thing can just get tacked onto a 30-day month. It could even still be February. It’d just be February 31st that’s leap day.
And with five 31-day months and seven 30-day months in a regular year, if you, for some reason, forget the number of days in a year, it’s much easier to figure out by simple arithmetic. Seven times 30 is 210, and 5 times 31 is 155, so that’s 365 in total. Much easier than doing 7*31 + 4*30 + 28. Of course, if you can’t remember the number of days in a year, perhaps any amount of arithmetic is too hard. OK that’s mean, I’m totally kidding. Sort of.
More importantly, had February been a normal month, I would’ve had at least two extra days to complete a blog post on financiers. As it is, it will have to slip into March. Which could have been late February, had the months been more balanced. Curse this calendar.