Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights
In cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.

In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure a year in the life?

I am pretty sure that there are more than 525,600 minutes in a year, even when it is not a leap year. But the sentiment is the same: a lot of time passes in a year and there are always a lot of memories and stories that emerge. (I don’t actually want to know how many cups of coffee I drink in a year.)

It has me thinking to the last year that there was a leap year. 2008. I wrote about it then but I think back to it again now. Not only was that year a leap year, but I had an extra day from crossing the dateline. I will never again have a year that long unless I cross the date line on a leap year once again.

(UPDATE: So what if I can’t do math. Don’t hate me.)

When you hear a news report on the radio that a forty year old male of no fixed address died over the weekend at an unspecified health authority site, you know that you will be coming to work to discover which of your clients passed away over the weekend. However you don’t usually expect the police to be investigating. The “no fixed address” usually means that there is a reduced amount of caring. I don’t know what happened and perhaps I never will. I just hope that the end result of this is an increase in funding so that sick and addicted people do not get discharged to the street and so that the homeless and suicidal don’t get turned away from health facilities.