10 Ways to Spend Your Leap Year Bonus Day

published 24 February 2008

1. Organize and paint your kitchen cabinets. Feel your mother's sense of pride radiate from three states away.

2. Spend the entire day on hold with the cable company.

3. Propose. It's customary in parts of Europe for women to ask for a guy's hand in marriage on February 29. In fact, the tradition holds that if the lucky bachelor says no, he has to buy the dejected lady a gift to soften the blow. (Hear that, Clooney? We're coming for you.)

4. Find and assemble all your tax receipts. Think of creative ways to expense your mortgage, your new plasma TV, and that Dior purse.

5. Get the 24-hour flu out of the way.

6. Instead of getting your own life, watch the complete series of My So-Called Life on DVD.

7. Road trip to Ikea! Spend three hours shopping, 20 hours struggling with the Allen wrench, and the remaining hour weeping when you realize the bookshelf is too big for your apartment.

8. Wax, pluck, bleach, shave, cut, dye, straighten, fluff.

9. Board games!

10. Stop fooling yourself and just go shopping.