Good morning Everyone!
As I am sitting here writing, listening to Tyra bark softly outside because she is ready to come back in, I am looking outside and noticing that it has gotten to where it is dark in the morning now for quite a while after we get up. From the fall equinox until the start of winter in December, here in Alabama we lose about one to three minutes of sunlight a day, which doesn’t seem like much, but slowly adds up. Fortunately, we still have some vestiges of light once I start home from work, which I do enjoy. That’s all about to change.
Daylight Savings Time ends this weekend, which means that here in the United States most of us will be moving our clocks back one hour. This is annoying, because for at least a week I will be looking at clocks calculating “If it is one p.m. now, last week it would have been 2:00 p.m.” (I never said I was a particularly deep thinker!)
Daylight Savings Time is one of those really stupid strange inventions I don’t understand. I know the reason Congress started it (in World War II, no less) was to help save energy, but has anyone really done a study to see how much energy it saves? It seems that the energy we save by lopping off one hour in the spring should be equalled by the energy we use when we add that hour back in the fall. I think it was Dave Barry who said something like “Try as you will, you can come up with no logical explanation for Daylight Savings Time.” My favorite description of it, and I’m not sure whether it was by Will Rogers or O. Henry or someone else, is the comparison of it between a blanket where someone cuts off one foot from the bottom of the blanket to add one foot to the top so it will cover their head! I really think we should just do away with it – I don’t really care whether we keep summer hours or winter hours, I just wish we’d stick with one or the other.
One of the most amusing things to do on the spring end of Daylight Savings Time is to park outside the day care of your choice and watch the kids as they enter on the first Monday after it begins. The kids don’t care what the adults told them, they know that something about the time is not right, and it is a sleepy passel of young ‘uns that pass through the day care portals on that day. (I suspect the adults are sleepy too; we’re just better at hiding it! )
I do like getting the one extra hour back this weekend, although each year it seems like the extra hour slides by without any special recognition. That’s probably because I spend it sleeping, one way or another.
I am grateful to the person who invented the memory aid “Spring forward, Fall back.” Without it, I wouldn’t ever remember which way to turn – uh, the clock, I mean!
Have a great weekend folks!
Nancy
P.S. For a while, Indiana and Arizona (I think) refused to recognize Daylight Savings Time. Does anyone know if they still do, or if there are any other states/regions out there that have decided to march to the beat of a different drummer? Kudos to them, whoever they are!
Tales from the Mom-Side 