Ah, Ground Squirrel Day, one of my favorite days of the year. How do you celebrate? Do you get your ground squirrel from the butcher’s shop or do you go old school and catch them yourself at the local park? Ground Squirrel Day isn’t celebrated as widely in the Czech Republic; the first squirrels or spring have yet to emerge from their winter dens.

I miss those times when I was a kid, sitting around the ol’ squirrel grinder. These days, it doesn’t seem like the holiday has the same innocent charm.

I’d been planning to commemorate leap day with this episode, but I forgot. Over on the right-hand side of the page you can find the holiday ticker, which counts down upcoming holidays. It gives the date in two systems, the old-fashioned Gregorian way (April 2th) and the Muddled Age date (4:0).

The muddled calendar is based on the date I first started my nomadic life. I got the Fed-Ex from the escrow company declaring me formally homeless, loaded up my car, and drove away. A couple of interesting notes:

• The Muddled Calendar is zero-based. Once adopted, we will be done with those annoying people who said that the year 2000 wasn’t really the millenium.
• The Muddled Calendar is more accurate than the Gregorian. That old calendar is based on a solar year of 365.2425 days, while the Muddled calendar has a year of 365.2422 days. If the world doesn’t adopt the Muddled Age Calendar by the year 4909, there’s going to be trouble. The MuddleCal is off by 0.000001 days, and I figure by the time that matters, tidal drag will have lengthened the day anyway.

Still, there are a couple of things that might slow the adoption of the Muddled Calendar. Once we clear these things up, Global adoption should be a piece of cake.

• It has no months, or other structures that give one a sense of the season. Without losing the pure numbering system, it would be nice to have segments of the year (probably based on equinoxes and whatnot)
• The calendar needs a catchy name. That’s critical in this day and age. The seasonal segments should have catchy names as well.
• Finally, in the muddled calendar, the special “2th” holidays lose their poetic anchor.

So, while a couple of challenges remain, I think the obvious advantages of the MuddleCal will one day make it the way we all track time.