Run fast for your mother, run fast for your father

[venta]

Some time last year, I bestirred myself to look up what, exactly, is meant by the phrase "dog days". Wikipedia tells me that it "refers to the sultry days of summer[citation needed]". It seems we get this from the Roman diēs caniculārēs, the hot weather associated with the dog star, Sirius.

I don't agree.

To me, the phrase "dog days" always means this gap between Christmas and New Year. The dog days are the nothing days when everyone is sunk in comfortable indolence. In the past few days, I've heard a number of otherwise on-the-ball people ask what day it is. Because at this time of year, no one knows: every day is like Sunday, and we drift along with a vague idea that it might be the 29th today. Or the 30th? Who knows. Who cares?

Someone told me a few days ago that the Ethiopian calendar has 12 months of 30 days, and the leftovers are collected together in a vague dog end of a month which lasts for 5 or 6 days (depending on leapage). Disappointingly, due to their calendar being offset from ours, this happens around the beginning of September. But I think it's an excellent idea that we should adopt, a thirteenth month after Christmas; spare days that don't count, where nothing is expected to happen.

This year, I've run out of leave and am working 29th-31st. As a result, I'm just about aware that today is Tuesday. The office is quiet and sparsely populated, though, and my room has only me in it (and 9 empty desks). There's considerably more of a holiday vibe than there was in the frenetic, festive-jumper-wearing let's-go-for-a-drink days before Christmas.

I am not working like a dog. I'm getting quite a lot done, but in a quiet and lazy sort of way. I'm working like it's a dog day.

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I recently saw this period referred to on gerald_duck's LJ as 'Crimbo limbo'.

I answered the phone once this morning and once yesterday. I suspect that's all the work I will be doing this week.

[venta.livejournal.com]

That would be a good phrase, were it not that "Chrimbo" always makes my teeth curl.

I am doing some actual programming, and it's rather fun. Most people don't believe how little programming programmers get to do in the general run of things :)

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Me too, a bit. Except there's a poem by I believe Kit Wright which rhymes it with 'Rimbaud'.

[venta.livejournal.com]

That almost makes it ok :)

You know the scene is very humdrum

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

When the indolence, nothingness and boredom, boredom kicks in, I always like to remember that the Buzzcocks recorded Spiral Scratch in the gap between Christmas and the New Year.
If they can do something worthwhile during the dead week, why can't I?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Did they really? I didn't know that. That is a Good Fact.

I shall have to try and find time to dig my vinyl out and give it a spin before the end of tomorrow :-)

[deborahw37.livejournal.com]

I'm liking your idea! I love this quiet hinterland between Christmas and New Year .. every day is like Sunday.

Sorry you're out of leave but at least work sounds relaxed

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Not allowed to work, but lovely weather for walking. Miles to the farthest shops, buy things, decide they don't fit and return them the next day with another walk, but no stress, as I wasn't planning to do anything else anyway, and hey, its sunny.

Lovely in the woods to the N and S of me, crisp mornings to freeze the mud, ice covered ponds to smash with sticks!

The 12*30+5 day feast calendar has certainly been proposed a lot over the years.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

More the dog-end days than the dog days, then?

I quasi-independently invented a calendar 12 months of 30 days with a 5 or 6 day festival/holiday period as a precociously mathy child. I also thought a five-day week would be much neater as part of that scheme, since it would fit neatly and you wouldn't have all this awkwardness of not knowing what day of the week a particular date happens on. I tried and failed to come up with a better approximation for leap year frequency than the Gregorian calendar rules, and was duly impressed at how well they'd done.

Some time later a teacher trolled my class with the old 'decimal time' thing, and I was briefly elated but then bitterly disappointed.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'm willing to take the awkwardness of not knowing which day of the week things will fall on in exchange for not dooming someone to a lifetime of Monday birthdays!