ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Near the end of October I read about this thing called NaBloPoMo on a blog I like. After I got over my “WTF is naw-blow-poh-moh” reaction, I went and checked it out. Apparently November is National Blog Posting Month and the official naw-blow-poh-moh issues a challenge each November to post an entry every single day. The blogger from whom I learned about this had essentially the same initial reaction I did, which was that not all days are worth blogging, and that an entry written for its own sake is better than an entry written to meet a quota.

She originally planned not to participate this year. Then she read that on the official site that they recommend choosing a blogging theme for the month. This sounded like such a neat idea that it motivated her to participate after all. Her topic? Things that inspire you.

This got me thinking maybe I’d like to do the same thing. But the trouble I have is that I’m not organized enough in my blogging to pick a single theme for a month, let alone write something coherent within that scope for 30 days. I tend to blog the same way I have conversations—if I think of something interesting, I say it. If not, what else is there? In the end, I decided not to participate in the NaBloPoMo contest because I felt it might distract me from the more important things I should be concentrating on, such as school and my new job.

But I did spend some time reflecting on how these days there is a month for pretty much anything you could think of. I made a list of some obscure things and googled for them to see if I could find evidence that anyone thought they were worth devoting an entire month of recognition to:

• dietary fiber month - I couldn’t find anything specifically addressing the importance of soluble and insoluble fibers in the diet. However, in Philadelphia they celebrate April as fiber arts month and give recognition to artists who work with textiles. This is not quite the same as dietary fiber month, but then I tried searching for “GI health month” and found out that March is national colon cancer awareness month. Good enough.
• salt month - In 1824 a man named John Dunn Hunter who had been raised by the Kansas Indians wrote a memoir in which he documented that they referred to the fourth month of their calendar as “salt month”, because game animals would gather at salt licks during this time. But today nobody cares enough about salt to give it its own month. As a person with a profound love of salt, I declare January salt month! Maybe I will paint my kitchen yellow this January in tribute to sodium.
• ball point pen month - None that I could find. No one cares.
• alpaca month - Conflicting information. An American blog claims that May is alpaca month. However, a couple of Australian websites name October as alpaca month. When you think about it, October in Australia and May in the United States are almost the same thing. So perhaps this neither of them are wrong.
• spay and neuter month - Pretty much everyone agrees it is February.
• owl month - One site claims it is October, another named November. This search turned up a lot of people who think they can cast magic spells and I guess owls must be related to that somehow. I don’t believe in magic, by the way.