Tag Archives: book recommendations

The Anti-Bed Rot Bucket List of 2024

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I’ve been writing up bucket lists for a few years now, and while I rarely cross off everything on them, I do find that they’re a great way to remember what fun thing I wanted to do or try…especially when the humidity of summer and the humdrum of working has put me in a fugue state of just wanting to rot in bed on my days off.

While I do think taking some time to yourself to not be ‘productive’ is both healthy and occasionally even necessary…I also don’t want to get too stuck in the rut of mindless media consumption in the guise of ‘resting’ for days on days.

April just so happens to be the month where I get all aspirational about life again, so I thought, why not share some of my bucket list items with you? Maybe this will inspire you to join me in creating your own bucket list, or adding to yours if you already have one! Therefore, in no particular order, here’s a short list of things I would love to do in 2024.

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The Leap Year Conundrum

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leap-year

While Leap Year is a fun rom-com (which I recommend for anyone who’s a fan of rom-coms, Ireland, or Matthew Goode) and a great way to wrap up February-the-month-of-love…this post is only tangentially about it. In my last post, I talked a bit about the Lunar New Year, and it would be remiss of me if I didn’t also talk about our solar calendar and it’s fun quirk: the leap year.

What is a leap year, why is a leap year, and what does it do besides give February an extra day? Well, I did some digging and it turns out the leap year exists partly because of the sun, partly because of Julius Caesar, and partly because of a Pope.

In 46 BCE, Julius Caesar decided to reform the Roman Calendar, because their year was about 10 days shorter than ours. In order to keep the seasons happening at a regular time, they would simply add a new month to the year whenever it was needed. Inspired by the Egyptians’ more regular solar calendar, Caesar decided to make the year 365 days long instead, to match the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. The new Julian calendar sounded like a simple fix, but implementing it took a bit of finagling. To make the transition from the old Roman calendar to the new one flow well, Caesar made that first new year 445 days long and then adjusted the next to our familiar 365 days.

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Here Be Dragons

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the-book-of-dragons

According to the Chinese Lunar calendar, 2024 is the Year of the Dragon, and I am a huge fan of dragons. They’re just very cool, and I find it fascinating and mysterious that almost every culture in the world has a dragon or dragon-esque creature in their legends, mythologies, and hagiography. I wonder if they came about in response to dinosaurs…

Funnily enough, I just finished reading The Book of Dragons, an anthology of short stories all about dragons by some of my favourite authors, and so I thought I’d combine those two coincidences into a fun, dragon-themed post! (You can read my response to this book on my own site, if you like!)

Before we get into the media recommendations, you might be wondering what’s with the title. I’d always thought ‘here be dragons’ was a phrase used by ancient mapmakers to mark unknown regions of the world. Apparently, this isn’t quite true! According to a National Geographic article, “apart from an inscription on a single, 16th-century globe, this claim is unfounded.” However, “mapmakers would often place monsters and other imagined creatures to marked unexplored areas” which might be why ‘here be dragons’ can often be found in fictional maps.

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