Rails - Aug 2005 - Rails Date/Time Validation and Parsing

I''m kind of getting my brain around Rails''ey things. Dates are
an annoyance
no matter what the language, but in keeping with DRY, I''m looking for
something like:

validates_date :between => 4/8/2002..5/29/2009

Or something like that.

Additionally, it seems someone somewhere must have created a wrapper around
strtotime. What I''m looking for is a way to parse nearly any valid date
entry into a Date type.

Thanks,

Steve Ross