What is Leap Day?

What is Leap Day?

Short answer: February 29.

Scientific answer (sort of): Every year, calendar folks grab the surplus 5 hours 48 minutes and 45 seconds that accumulate annually with the earth’s orbit around the sun, and stash them somewhere where we can’t see them. You see, it takes the Earth approximately 365.242189 days to circle the sun. Those spare hours need to be placed somewhere, so they’re gathered up, held in time-out or a safety deposit box or something, and after four years, the calendar crew compacts them into a full day, and sticks them at the end of the shortest month, February. This is done because, so far, no one has been able to put those hours, minutes, and seconds into a pretty desktop or wall calendar.

Folks have known about this time discrepancy for thousands of years, at least since the Egyptians. Finally, in 45 BCE, Julius Caesar did something about it. He (or one of his advisers) created the Julian calendar system and included one Leap Day every four years. Without it, 100 years down the road, the solstices and equinoxes would be off by 24 days, and farmers wouldn’t know when to plant their peas and potatoes.

Oh, and those few extra seconds add up, too. Pope Gregory XIII and his astronomers—who introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582, replacing Caesar’s self-named calendar—decided we needed to lose three Leap Days every 400 years. So, Leap Years are years divisible by 100, but not 400. That little tweak took care of most of the leftover seconds from the formula, but not all of them. In 10,000 years, someone else will have to do another adjustment. But we won't be around then, so really don't need to be concerned.

Oh, and the very unscientific, but traditional explanation of Leap Day: It’s the day a woman may ask a man to marry her or go to the Sadie Hawkins Dance… As if a bold woman ever needed a special day for that!

So, enjoy the extra day in February this year. And if he’s the right man for you, ask him out. But be prepared to pay. This is the 21st century, after all.

Naked in the Winter Wind

Where - and when - was she? And was this mountain man really her husband?
Naked in the Winter Wind, first book in The Fairies Saga, the tale of time travelers who pop back and forth between the 18th century and current times.
Amazon: http://amzn.to/1j3QtxY
Nook: http://bit.ly/1KA7UV5
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When I was a kid: phones

I realized how much phones have changed when I found out my granddaughter didn’t know how to unplug a phone jack. She didn’t even know what one was! Phones have always been wireless for her.

When I was a kid back in the 60s, the telephone company had to come to your house to set up a phone. The man brought the phone for you and even put a little tab with your phone number right in the middle of the rotary dial. Current phones don't even have a spot for this.

Standard issue rotary dial telephone

Phones weren’t available for purchase, either. You had to rent them. Basic black was the standard. If you wanted something pretty (like this pretty pink princess phone) or a wall phone, you had to pay an extra charge every month.

Pretty in pink 'Princess' phone

When push button phones became available, there was an extra monthly charge for that, too. And for each additional phone in the house. And for having an unlisted phone number. And of course, for long distance phone calls. Caller ID was a physical impossibility: there wasn't a place for one to show up!

Cordless phones didn’t come around until late 70s or early 80s. I can’t remember the exact year: I was too busy having babies. I do remember Shasta dumped our first cordless phone into the toilet. That would make it around 1983. Although the commode had clean water in it at the time, the phone never rang true again…
The range on the first generation of phones was short, just far enough to take a bathroom break in the middle of a long conversation. I certainly don’t miss being tethered to coiled phone cords that invariably tangled. A 20' cord soon became a 3' mass of snarls.

Oh, and if your phone rang and an operator was on the other end, it meant you had a long distance call which were outrageously expensive. It took a long time to come around, but direct dialing and lower long distance rates were great improvements to the phone system.

The greatest, until the internet came around, was the fax line.

It was the 70s when the company I worked for installed facsimile machines. How wonderful, even if the name was a mouthful. Now truck drivers could get oversize and weekend trip permits transmitted and printed out over phone lines. Other uses were soon found for fax machines including sending pictures or important documents from one office to another...or jokes.

Push button dialing was a great improvement, too. No more dialing 9 to get an outside line, then waiting clickity-click-click for the dial to return to its starting point so you could dial the second number. It took forever to dial those seven digits plus nine. It was even worse for long distance calls with the extra three for area code. And if the number you were calling was busy, there was no such thing as a redial button, option to leave a voice mail, or even an option to butt into a conversation with call waiting.

Yes, life was so tough back then.

I, and about a kazillion others, celebrated the arrival of cell phones. The first ones were outrageously expensive to buy outright. And then there were the program options. It cost 45 cents a minute unless you bought a plan. That dropped it down to 35 cents/minute. If you went over your minutes, you paid 45 cents a minute for overage. No refund if you didn’t use all your talk time, either. Rollover minutes hadn’t been created yet.

Don't get me started on texting! There were no alphabet keyboards on the early cell phones. Punch the number 2 to get to the letter C, wait for it to show up, then push 3 twice to get to E. You get the idea or not. I didn’t text until actual keyboards, hard key or virtual, came out. There was an extra price for each message sent or received, too. Some phone plans still have that, but those per text charges seem to be disappearing, too.

Phones will continue to be a part of our lives, I'm sure. Just be happy that what we have now has come so far.

Naked in the Winter Wind

And to see how a solar-powered smartphone saved the day in 1781, read about Evie in Naked in the Winter Wind, first in the time travel series The Fairies Saga.

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How did you picnic when you were a kid?

Picnics have been around since before I was born and, believe me, that was a long time ago. Nowadays, if we go on a picnic, we stop by Fred Meyer and grab an eight-piece pack of fried chicken and a few pints of various salads and maybe some Jo Jo’s (the most awesome super-fries in the world) or find a drive through that strikes our fancy.

Back when I was a youngster, there weren’t any fast food places that I recall and grocery stores didn't carry ready-to-eat food. I wasn’t the one driving around, but I don't recall a deli in our neighborhood in Scottsdale.

Mom made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on store-bought white bread, the fluffy kind that tore to pieces if the peanut butter was laid on too thick. We didn’t have baggies of any sort, either. The sandwiches were wrapped in waxed paper or aluminum foil. We took a few apples, maybe a box of cookies, and a bag of chips. Ah, remember Wampum chips? They were the ‘other’ corn chip; tortilla-style chips weren't available in bags yet. There were two flavors of potato chips: plain and barbecue. Nothing fancy like the gyro or biscuits and gravy flavored ones I saw recently. Times were tough…

 We put the goodies in an honest-to-goodness picnic basket, not a paper bag or cardboard bucket. Ours was made out of wicker — the natural fiber kind, not plastic. The set came complete with Melamine-type plates (sectioned with ridges so the beans didn’t slop over into the potato salad or sandwich). There were probably paper plates available, but we never used them. We shared a pitcher of Kool Aid or were treated to a bottle of soda, always making sure we saved the pop bottles to cash in for Popsicle money.

If we wanted music, we could open the car door and listen to music on the AM radio. No Sirius, iPods or streaming tunes through a smartphone; just crackly receptions and those obnoxious DJs who talked over the beginning and ends of every song. Of course, there were battery-operated transistor radios around. They came out around 1955. Aw, how great to listen to music without power cords. Just make sure you didn't bend or break the antenna!

We sprayed DDT-type bug spray or swatted flies and mosquitoes with a fly swatter, but otherwise were pest free. We didn’t have to worry about being interrupted by phone calls either. There was no such thing as a portable phone, much less cell phones. That’s why it was so important to let someone know where you were going and when you were coming back. Sort of like a flight plan for a day trip on the road. If you weren't back when expected, friends or family called around or came looking for you.

So, how did you picnic when you were a kid? And how do you do it now? For me, it’s a breeze: drive through. Oh, and make sure you ask for extra napkins, just in case your fast food is messier than my mother’s PB & J’s.



What kind of convenience food did they have in Revolutionary War era America? Find out about Evie’s ‘fast food, colonial-style’ in Naked in the Winter Wind, the tale of a 21st century woman who finds herself in a new and improved body in 1780s North Carolina.

http://amzn.to/1j3QtxY Amazon

http://bit.ly/1KA7UV5  Nook



Thanks for looking!

When I was a kid (more 60's nostalgia)

When I was a kid...I drank water out of the faucet or a hose. Drinking it from a plastic bottle was not only ridiculous, it was impossible. I don’t recall anything being in plastic bottles. And filtered? What was that? If water had to be ‘pure’ — as in good enough for baby formula — it was boiled first. If you wanted it cold, you took it from the pitcher in the fridge or added ice cubes that came from one of those knuckle-buster aluminum trays. And woe be to the person who didn’t refill it!

Beer and soda were available in glass bottles, but a ‘church key’ or a sharp corner had better be nearby; there were no twist caps. In Scottsdale, there was a two cent deposit on smaller bottles, five cents on quarts. My brother started his first 'business' haunting construction sites, talking the workers out of their empties so he'd have Popsicle money.
You could get beer in a can, but a bottle opener was needed; pull tabs weren’t around either. Oh, and a lady never drank alcohol from a bottle or can. If she, dear me, did drink spirits, it would be from a glass or frosted mug and after the kids went to bed.

We only got soda on rare occasions. Coca Cola in a six-ounce bottle was extra special. You’d think a bigger bottle would be better, but those cute little clear aqua/green curvy containers called to every one of us. The ‘soft drink’ we usually got was powdered and required one cup of sugar and two quarts of water be added. At one point, they even had root beer-flavor! I remember Kool Aid, Welch’s, and some other brand: Rite-Ade, maybe? If you know, please leave a comment below. The uncertainty is bugging me.

One thing we did have in the 60s that is still around now, at least in many places and in the summertime: ice cream trucks. Yup, back then they came at nap time, too. I can still hear my mother’s mild cuss words, ‘Gosh darn them’ or dag nab it’ when the worn out recording of ‘kiddie music’ disturbed the neighborhood. The dingy-white van with colorful decals came rolling up the road at about two miles per hour. Oh, and he (they were always older men) would get really mad if we stopped him before Mom let us have money. We didn’t always have coin or deserve a treat, but it was fun catching up to him and seeing if he still had bullets available.

If you weren’t alive back in the early 60’s when unbreakable soda containers became popular, here’s a bit of trivia. The ‘pull tabs’ were not attached. One of my early memories was of picnicking with my grandmother. She made a game of scouring the campground with a stick, picking up all the discarded pull tab rings with the angular aluminum seal still attached. She made it a game to see who could gather the most. Gross? Yes, picking up others' garbage was, but her early environmental responsibility stayed with me.


Are you setting a good example for others? Let’s hope we all are. Grandparents don’t stick around forever. That's why some of us are here: to replace them. So, live long, be healthy, and set a good example for others. You never know who’s watching you!

Already tired of the holiday shows on TV? Grab a long book and get lost in another time era and location. Here's one of my favorites: http://amzn.to/1j3QtxY and http://bit.ly/1KA7UV5 (Nook)


She awoke in a different time and without a memory. Was this mountain man really her husband?

Being a kid in the 50s and 60s

When I was a kid, we had to entertain ourselves with limited sources. We didn’t have electronics or the internet. Heck, we didn’t even have computers. Well, I guess there were a couple of them in Phoenix, but they took up a whole floor and were mainly for figuring electric bills or payroll. I remember seeing one on a field trip when I was eight or so. It was as interesting as the huge vats of milk at the dairy. Big, metallic, and of no use to me (ever, or so I thought).

Back then, if I wanted to know something, I asked Mom. I guess I was overly curious or maybe she was just tired of my perpetual ‘but why?’ replies to her answers. When a door-to-door salesman came to our house offering encyclopedias (Encyclopedia Americana, I think), she and my dad signed up for a set. I remember the red binding with gold lettering...and that it was outrageously expensive.
When it was too hot to go outside or I was tired of picking on my little brothers, I’d pick out one of the 20 or so volumes. I'd go through it page by page, ‘surfing’ the mostly black and white pictures, stopping to read whatever struck my fancy. Countries were boring, but animals and some of the plants were pretty cool. Not enough color, though.

We had never heard of karaoke, but we did have a record player. We made up our own dances to the sounds of Oklahoma, West Side Story, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake or (oh, so cool) we sang Harry Belafonte songs. Day-O at the top of our lungs was always a blast.

We did have a television, one of the few on the block. It was a little black and white ‘portable’ which meant it was on a rolling cart so it could be moved from room to room. I didn’t know anyone who had…gasp…two TVs! And color television was little more than a rumor. According to the encyclopedia (I looked) color was available, but the only stations that broadcast in color were on the east coast. Good old Scottsdale, Arizona had four TV stations at the time. They only broadcast from early morning to midnight or so, sometimes later on Fridays and Saturdays. And always in black and white.

Yes, we had ‘the classics’: Legos, TinkerToys, Lincoln Logs, yoyos, toy trucks, baby dolls, and even the latest: Barbie! Everything was static, though. If it moved, it was because of me. I had to pull the doll’s string or turn the key on the wind-up car to make it move. Battery-operated toys: I can’t remember any.

Fifty years plus later, so much has changed. What will it be like in 2065 for my granddaughters? Maybe SegWays and hoverboards will replace bicycles and skateboards. I’m (pretty) sure that electronic games will still be around. Maybe new homes will come with holo-decks like on Star Trek? What do you think?

Want to see the future through another’s eyes? Check out The Great Big Fairy. See the 21st century through an 18th century female slave’s eyes. Is she overwhelmed? Wouldn’t you be?

I love being an old lady!

I love being an old lady.
Really. I do.
I’m no longer a chick (cute, dumb or otherwise), a ditzy broad (although I have my senior moments) and I don’t have to worry about make-up, perming my hair or wearing the latest fashion.
Doors are opened for me. Young men offer me their seat on the bus so I don’t have to stand. Clerks offer to carry out my groceries. Do they think I’m feeble or do they respect me because of my graying locks? Either way, I really don’t care. At least no one has been rude to me in ages and I don’t have to stand while commuting in a public conveyance.
Young women aren’t jealous or derisive of my body or attire. I haven’t felt the sting of another female scoffing at what I’m wearing or sneer at my lack of taste. Maybe they chalk it up to being an old lady, but the reality is that I never had and still don’t have a sense of style.
What is old lady attire?

Aqua scrubs worn in my greenhouse

 In case you didn’t know, it’s clean. Comfortable. And convenient. No glittery low-rider pants with hard to find belt loops that always seem to come undone, tight hammertoe-creating shoes, flaking eyeliner and mascara, pokey, push-up underwire brassieres or hand-wash only silk shirts. My usual attire consists of a colorful, somewhat supporting sports bra, yoga or sweatpants, and a colorful ‘scrubs’ top with pockets for my pen and notebook, a tissue or two, and my smartphone. After I slide into my Crocs or Go-Walk shoes (no chance of blisters or bunions), I’m ready to tackle the world.

There are a few negative aspects of being old. I need reading glasses, but I don’t need them for gardening, driving, or scouting rainbows or wild turkeys. I'd rather not have the achy joints, but other than that, physically, I’m in great shape. My heart works well enough that I’m not breathless just walking across the parking lot to the grocery store. My brain still functions fine. I may not remember what I came into a room for, but I know my name and all the important stuff: phone, social security, and credit card numbers.
I'm glad I paid attention to my grandmother. I brushed my teeth, ate well (maybe too well), and still take my vitamins. I have all my teeth, pertinent parts, and can cook and clean better than any woman half (or one-fourth) my age. My advice and/or opinion is still sought (sometimes) and I can crack a joke with the best of them. True, I only get wolf whistles from my husband, but he’s the only one I want them from anyhow. And thanks to that now long gone miserable time of life referred to as ‘the change,’ I no longer have to worry about getting pregnant. Phew!
Do I have any regrets? Duh? Don’t we all? However, I’ve learned that no matter what, I can’t change the past. I can do my best not to make the same mistakes again, can gently urge my daughters, granddaughters - and anyone else who might listen and benefit - to not make rash choices and ALWAYS treat others as they want to be treated.
Yup. Be kind, patient, and enjoy the life you have right now. Tomorrow you may be laid up because of an accident due to road rage. Or without a job or best friend because of hasty or cruel words. Or maybe have a horrible toothache because you didn’t brush your teeth.
I’m hoping I'll avoid all of the above discomforts because along with getting older, I think I'm getting wiser.
Viva gray hair and wrinkles! I must have done something right to survive the last sixty-something years!

Note: Here’s a great story about an older woman who was able to do it all over again, but in a younger body. In a different time era. And with a severe case of amnesia. Perky old lady in a young, hot body. Will her innate sense and savvy get her out of predicaments with cougars (the mountain lion-type), creeps and kidnappers? Find out in NAKED IN THE WINTER WIND, specially priced at only 99 cents. Available on Kindle and Nook.

Dani Haviland, author of The Fairies Saga time travel series, loves writing, gardening, and photography. Find out more about her and her books (and see some pretty pictures) at danihaviland.com.

Where is it in Outlander?

Why weren’t many babies born in the spring back in the days of yore? I read in one of the Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon — can’t remember which one— that it was because the folks were too pooped to procreate after long hours of harvesting and ‘putting up’ in autumn.

I believe it.

I spent a weekend this Saturday putting up tomatoes.

Just tomatoes. Not corn. Or squash. Or any other fruit, grain, or vegetable that folks in the 18th century (give or take a few hundred years) had to process.

I sauced a small portion of the fruit from my twenty or so tomato plants, most of which I had started from seed. I used some of the bursting-at-the seams red tomatoes and all of the ripe yellow ones (Blondkopchen, I believe) from ONE plant. Still, these were more than enough to keep me up to my elbows in tomato skins and juice.

Typically, tomatoes are blanched, dipped in icy cold water, then peeled, cut up or mashed, portioned into canning jars (or crocks or whatever), steamed or boiled in a hot water bath, then put in a dark place.

Well, I did some of that. After taking a shortcut to saucing, the dark place I chose was the freezer!

It would have taken me many hours longer, but I had a friend. My shortcut. A Squeezo Strainer. It’s an old kitchen tool, designed by an Italian (he loved his pasta sauce, too), all metal, and because of this mechanical wonder, I almost had a crankingly good time 'putting up.' I simply dropped the cored and quartered tomatoes (I re-sized them if they were big; left them whole if they were cherry-sized) into the hopper, turned the handle attached to the spiral auger/shaft, and watched as sauce/juice came out one side while the seeds and skins were blurped out the other.
All went well until it came to those confounded tiny yellow tomatoes. The itty-bitty seeds quickly filled up the grooves in the auger/screw so after a few minutes, the juice backed out the handle, the place of least resistance. I had to discombobulate the contraption, clean out the skins and seeds from the endless grooved shaft, reassemble the unit, and then get cranking again.

In the end, it was still less labor intensive than peeling, pounding and sieving, pouring into canning jars, then processing in hot water for I don’t know how long. So now, with a minimum of effort, I’ll have dozens of pints of tomato sauce before the season is done.

And when the winter rains are falling and the dark and gloom overtake my raised beds, I can still open up the freezer; pull out my homegrown ‘squeezed’ tomato sauce and quick-frozen blanched zucchini, sauté some onions, garlic, and basil, and create a wonderful gluten-free dinner, complete with the smells of summer.

*~* By the way, I’m offering a free e-book copy of Little Bear and the Ladies to the first person who correctly tells me which Outlander book references the lack of springtime human babies and quotes the entire paragraph. Send your answer to dani.haviland@gmail.com. First 'postmark' with correct answer wins!

Just the juicy parts of the yellow itty bitty tomatoes

Getting ready to push the yellow tomatoes through the Squeezo. Seeds and skins go into small white bowl in back.

Free copy of this (or any other one of my) ebooks for first correct answer to 'Where (and which book) is it in Outlander?