On calendars

First, let me take care of some business.

I did warn you that I was going to be a bit serious and personal in some of my posts this year. I hope you enjoyed them. Perhaps there will be more to come.

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Since there are more NFL Playoff games this weekend, Friday's post will focus on the divisional matchups and again I'll give you my "expert" predictions. While my scores & predictions weren't perfect, I did come close to the mark on three out of four of the games. Hopefully I can do as well this weekend.

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During the day I was thinking about what I would write about for today's post. After I went to the post office and cleared out my mail box, I went to Barnes and Noble. Now if you've read some of my archives, you'll know that I don't like bookstores. Not because I don't like books because I do. I dislike bookstores because I always tend to spend more money in them than I intend to or have budgeted for. Tonight was not as bad as it could have been. I did walk out with a few more things than I had intended on buying, though.

Specifically, I was looking for a Dilbert page-a-day 2006 calendar, since I've had one of these for the last three years. Now that the new year is slightly over a week old, stores that sell calendars are panicking that they will not be able to sell their stock and have drastically discounted the price. Tonight calendars were 50% off. That was good. Perhaps next week I'll go back again to see what stock is left & how much more they will be discounted.

Have you ever considered just how many different calendars are printed each year? Tonight I must have seen at least 45 different page-a-day calendars and probably over 100 different wall calendars. You can find a calendar for just about any interest or hobby. Any subject you like - pick one.

Some of the calendars that I recall seeing were about sports teams, Nascar drivers, swimsuit models, pets and wild animals. There were calendars offering daily jokes, jokes about doctors, jokes about old people, several comic strip based calendars, new words, Bible verses, trivia games, tips on crafty things. Calendars showing scenery, sunsets, windmills, waterfalls, lighthouses, constellations. There were calendars based on movies from the past year, airplanes both modern and military, motorcycles, cars, trucks, road signs. I even saw a page-a-day calendar offering 365 different sex positions a year, including simple drawings on how to do them. This calendar was a new one for me. They also had your basic desk calendars, calendar notebooks, calendar-date book-journal thingies. Absolutely amazing was the variety. All for half off.

Wouldn't you know it, of all the page-a-day calendars they had, I could not find any Dilbert calendars. So I ended up buying a small book of dragon stories for my daughter's birthday (planning way ahead) and two calendars. One for my mom and one for me.

My calendar of choice is called Forgotten English, a 365-day calendar of Vanishing Vocabulary and Folklore for 2006. So today and throughout the year, I'll share some of these forgotten English words and folklore based stories with you, starting TODAY.

Today's word was: PLUVIAL: pertaining to rain; rainy. From Latin pluvialis, rain.

-Daniel Lyon's Dictionary of the English Language, 1897.