I have had a little trick that I developed 7 years ago.
I convert dates relative to 2000 Jan 1 (actually 31st Dec 1999 as 0).
I can then store that offset in a long, rather than stuff around with Date variables. (Also avoid Date fields in the Data Base)

I just noticed that if you store Date into a Long, it does something similar.
Except that it appears to use 1900
Code:
 Dim myLong as Long
     myLong = Date
Does that mean some swine got the same idea, except he beat me by 100 years ?