The Twenty-Second of February, Twenty Twenty-two.

22/02/2022 – remove the slashes, and today’s date (in DD/MM/YYYY) is a palindrome. This happens fairly frequently in the time we’re living in, and with 20XX, we’ve especially had a glut of them in Februaries for the last 22 years… though this is the last eight-digit February palindrome we’ll be seeing!

Today is also a ubiquitous palindrome day: it’s a palindrome in the US format too, at least, in the short format: 2/22/22 in M/DD/YY is a five digit palindrome. It’s reasonably rare to have a palindrome day in both formats, and today’s earned the nickname “Twosday”, falling as it does, on the second day of the week.

Personally, I’d call this a semi-ubiquitous ^{(I ain’t no ox moron)} palindrome day… not to be a spoilsport, but as a programmer, ISO8601 is where it’s at. Let’s not leave out YYYY-MM-DD.

Sure, if you shorten it to YY-M-DD then 22-2-22 is a palindrome too, and slightly more pleasing to write than in the US format… but that’s how we get date overflow issues, so let’s… not.

The next fully-ubiquitous (forgive my tautology…) 8-digit palindrome day is not so far away, considering the last one was over 900 years ago, on 1111-11-11. However, I’m still sure I won’t be around to celebrate it with the middle chocolate of my Advent calendar, on the Twelfth of December, Twenty-one Twenty-one.

a closed and common orbit – Becky Chambers

I was super excited to start reading this, having devoured the long way to a small angry planet over the summer. I skipped it right to the top of my TBR, which was very much still full from my birthday back in September, and I wasn’t disappointed at all.

It’s a standalone novel; while it follows on from the long way, and I got plenty out of the continuing character development, it’s absolutely not important to read them in order. Just jump in!

Mild spoilers after the jump…

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The Wolf Border

This book really grabbed me. Jennie recommended it, and I read it in long chunks (during a quiet week in my long holiday between jobs.) I really enjoyed the way Sarah Hall describes so thoroughly, and accurately captures the ins and outs of every day experience… looking after a newborn, and travel in the UK were so accurately depicted and resonated so much that I really felt the rest of Rachel’s experiences were very real as well. At times, especially early in the story, there was a sort of narrative detachment from the protagonist. The warming up of the narrative prose as the story developed drew me in well to the plight of the wolves, and Rachel’s relationships, as well as the wider cast of characters.