As some of you in the states may know, yesterday, 18 February, was President’s Day.

If you’re not familiar with the origin of this…holiday…here’s a little snippet from the source du jour:

Presidents Day (or Presidents’ Day), is a commonly used, but erroneous, name for the federal holiday officially designated as Washington’s Birthday. It is also the official name of a concurrent state holiday celebrated on the same day in a small number of states. It is celebrated on the third Monday of February. [Link]

Yes, you read it right. It’s a false named holiday. It started as a celebration of our “Founding Father”, but then through a failed initial attempt to combine Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, the retail industry stepped in and made the decision for us. President’s Day would celebrate ALL presidents, and it would be a shopping day for everyone who works at a company that recognizes the federal holiday (basically anyone but retail).

What that furthermore means, is that everyone who works retail is working on the 18th, while everyone who doesn’t work retail is SHOPPING on the 18th. It’s a win-win for everyone, in my opinion.

Now, I did not do much shopping on the 18th - only grocery shopping because I wanted to prepare a special dinner in celebration of yet another fake holiday. Instead of being a retail whore, I accomplished two primary things while I was at home on the 18th.

First, I solved our 4×4 Rubik’s Cube, which was not much of a challenge since we pretended it was a 2×2 and only scrambled it in groupings. I solved it using the exact same process as one uses on a 3×3 cube, but I was none the less impressed with myself.

Second, I finished the last edits on a short that I wrote last year, called The Peregryn. It will be available on the Amazon Kindle, and in downloadable e-Book format.

Third, ok so I did more than 2 things on the 18th, I did about 25% of the initial edit of the humorous adventure story that I wrote back in 2006. It’s around 58k words, so it’s taking me a bit longer to make the first pass, but I’m hoping to have it ready for publishing by end of year.

In other book news, David is actively editing The Venus Diary, and I hope to have his first round of edits incorporated by mid-March, in preparation for publishing by end of April. I have also submitted the first book in the series, Box of Hair: A Fairy Tale, to Barnes & Noble, Borders, and a local children’s book store for possibly inclusion in their brick & mortar locations. We’ll see what happens there.

So all-in-all, I worked on President’s Day just like many of you out there. But I did celebrate by cooking a yummy steak dinner, complete with asparagus and a festive salad.

Happy Birthday all ya’ll, except for he who must not be named.

This sarcastic entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 11:42 am and is filed under Books, Holidays, Shopping, Work, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.