Today is Sunday, January 6 and there are only 39 days until Valentine’s Day. If you are buying candy make sure you are not getting left over Christmas candy or early Easter candy. Today we remember the birthdays of Joan of Arc, Jedediah Strong Smith and Carl Sandburg. On this day in 1535 the city of Lima, Peru was founded by Francisco Pizzaro, in 1838 Samuel Morse made the first public demonstration of the telegraph and in 1958 Gibson patented the Flying V Guitar. In New Mexico it is Admission Day, in Uruguay it is Children’s Day and in the US it is National Shortbread Day and National Cuddle Up Day.

Since this is the first post of the month, let me give you a few facts about January. It is one of the newer months of the calendar we know today. It was named for the god of beginnings and transitions, Janus. It was added to the calendar with 29 days around 713 BC. Julius Caesar gave it the 31 days it still has in the modern Gregorian calendar.

January’s birthstone is the garnet and the birth flower is the pink Dianthus caryophyllus. It is National Mentoring Month, National Healthy Weight Awareness Month, Hot Tea Month, National Soup Month and Oatmeal Month. You can now put the January trivia folder away for a year.

Well, we are now into another year.  I remember when I was a youngster that the turn of the century was a long time off.  My friends and I were convinced that we would be dead long before the year 2000 arrived.  Here we are in 2019 and I am not dead yet.  Either I have been very lucky or we were rather dumb when we were kids.  As much as I hate to admit it, I have to go with the latter.  I was watching parts of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest and several things came to my mind.  One is that I cannot help but wonder where Ryan Seacrest came from and who thought he was the perfect person to take over for an icon like Dick Clark.  No offense, Ryan, but you are lucky that there are cue cards. The other thing that I wondered about was what made all those people think that standing out in the freezing cold for a number of hours with no food or bathroom facilities was a great idea?

What made this year even more interesting was that it was raining and security checks did not allow people to bring umbrellas in with them. I have never thought that it would be exciting to go to Times Square for New Year’s Eve and be crammed in with 2.5 million other people, all of whom are hungry, tired , cold, in desperate need of a bathroom and, this year, soaking wet. Aside from everything else, imagine what they all smelled like!

Anyway, a new year has started and we have already started seeing the commercials for income tax services. Pretty soon we will see the President’s Day sales with fake Washingtons and Lincolns trying to get us to buy cars, clothing, furniture, jewelry, colognes and just about everything else you can think of. Shortly after that we will lose the presidents but will still have the commercials trying to get us to buy those same things for Valentine’s Day. I understand the jewelry, cologne and clothing, but would your wife really be happy if you bought her a new end table? And let’s be serious. If you just fell for the idea that you needed to buy a new car for Christmas, why would you need another one for President’s Day or Valentine’s Day? Besides, if you couldn’t afford one at Christmas, you probably haven’t put together the money to buy one a few weeks later.

I like to celebrate the new year because it means I have lasted through the old one. As I said earlier, when I was in my teens (in the 60’s), the year 2000 seemed so far away that I was convinced that if I did last that long I would just sit in a chair and have someone wipe drool off my chin. If I made it to midnight I would mumble something that sounded like Happy New Year and then nod back off to sleep. It is now 2019 and I am in pretty good shape, I can take care of the drool on my chin by myself and was able to stay awake and still be coherent at midnight. Granted, I did not last much later than that, but I did make it that long. It was worth it just to see over 2 million sopping wet people get confetti stuck to their faces.

This week our fact tells us that if you could count the number of times a cricket chirps in one minute, divide by two, add nine and divide by two again, you would have the correct temperature in Celsius degrees. I see a couple problems with this. One is, when counting the chirps, how do you know it is only one cricket? The other problem is that since we use the Fahrenheit scale here in the US, what good does knowing the Celsius temperature do? In the long run I think it would be simpler to just look at a thermometer or one of the weather apps on your phone and not worry about isolating one cricket. Besides if the cricket only chirps twice, as an example, and you go through the formula provided, it would give you a temperature of 5 C. That converts to 41 F. At that temperature you probably aren’t going to hear crickets and if you do it is because one is living in your garage, but not for long, because it is too cold.