June 31 - Because It's Better than Jan. 31

Daylight Saving Time has me thinking. Since we're able to add an hour here and take an hour there, just because we want to, I suggest Summer Expansion Time.

Let's drop January 31 and replace it with an extra day at the end of June. The result is one less day of winter and one more day of summer.

Why not? The months are anything but consistent. They already can come with 28, 29, 30 or 31 days and rather than ending on the last day of a week, months end ... whenever.

It isn't like our current months are actually corresponding with any natural cycle. The passing of the moon doesn't define them; neither does the sun nor our position to it. Those before us just pretty much made them up.

(And by the way, they even got the making up wrong. The prefixes Sept, Oct, Nov and Dec have Latin roots and mean seven, eight, nine and 10. Unfortunately, those are the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th months of the year.)

So, it's not like we'd be defacing a Rembrandt to tweak the structure of the months. Take a day from January and the month ends on the 30th. Add a day to June and it ends on the 31th. And, really, nothing would be any more messed up than it already is.

I digress, but I have to add I think it's a bit curious that in a modern world where consistency is insisted upon in just about every way we go about tracking anything, our calendar continues to languish in the 15th Century.

I mean, 12 inches always make a foot, 16 ounces always make a pound and 60 minutes always make an hour. These things are what they always are. Our measurements are consistent.

But it all starts getting murky when dealing with longer periods of time. Take this leap year we are currently dealing with as another example of something not being quite right. This is a leap year because any year equally divisible by four is a leap year most of the time.

That is why 1996 and 2004 were both leap years but 2000 was not. It seems that all years exactly divisible by four are leap years except when that year also is equally divisible by 100.

???

This is how we keep track of long periods of time? A bit of re-thinking is in order. But, in the meantime, with our calendar as it is, I say we drop kick the dark, dreary January 31 off our calendars and welcome the sunny, smiling June 31 into our world.

It's not like we're gonna break something that doesn't already need fixing.