My own style of Leap Year

Every year, Mike and I seriously collaborate on a new calendar design to take to the Cowboy Christmas show in Las Vegas. It's our biggest show of the year and we try to take several new products or at least, updated products for it.

The calendar has become fairly popular. In fact, we get a lot of repeat orders every year so we work hard to create something truly usable and special.

Well, this year we outdid ourselves. The calendar was designed after an old 1944 Meeteetse Mercantile calendar from Meeteetse, Wyoming. We've had the old calendar for years and have always loved the richness of it's yellowed pages and the large old fashioned lettering. So we used it as a guide for making our new "old looking" 2008 calendar PLUS we added some favorite recipes and put all kinds of funny stories and photos in it. It took over 70 hour to layout and design but it was well worth it. The calendar was a big hit in Vegas and we sold out before the show ended. In fact, we're about to place a small reorder because we still have orders to fill.

Then yesterday, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was Doc Rhoads, Mike's good friend from Afton, Wyoming. Now, Doc is a dentist, chuckwagon cook and champion BBQ'er so naturally, I asked him for a recipe to go in the calendar and he graciously obliged (he's Mister June). He asked me if I had a calendar handy - and I did. Then he asked me to check out January 27th.

My calendar has no January 27th. I leaped all the way from the 26th to the 28th . . . seamlessly. And, I managed to have February start on exactly the right day so basically, what we have is a totally free, non-assigned Thursday at the end of January. It's not on my calendar so you could say, I'm pretty open for anything that day.

I wish I could say I was horrified - or mortified - at my mistake. But, I wasn't. I've learned to embrace and even adore the quirky imperfections old comfortable things in my life - so what better way to start this year than with an slightly incorrect but still usable recipe calendar.

And one more thing . . . apparently Tillie Jane's Fish Chowder recipe in May is missing a key ingredient - FISH! I reckon Tillie Jane figured most folks would just know to add fish to fish chowder. You would, wouldn't you?