We turned our clocks ahead an hour this past Sunday morning,
at 2 AM.
If you didn’t, then you’re late…or you’re early…one or the
other.
Not sure which.
But you definitely are…one or the other.
It’s a little confusing…I know.
But that’s how life is.
I know that too.
What it means, basically, is that you pretty much lost that
hour, plus whatever activity you would have normally been participating in at
that time of the day…2 AM.
Poof…it’s just
went away.
Gone, gone, gone.
Don’t ask where…just accept it. It’s better that way.
In the past, that would have meant “last call” was moved up and I lost an hour at the local tavern, not
to mention the 3 or four beers I may or may not have consumed during that lost period.
Now, it just means I lose the hour I normally spend in bed, laying
on my left side. Now, at 2 AM, I just
skip the left side and go immediately to my back from my stomach and hope
the left side doesn’t notice.
If it notices, then…well, you don’t want to know.
So that’s how the time change affects me.
That, and I have trouble finding my socks at 7 AM again.
But overall, I enjoy the “spring
forward”.
Suddenly the skies are bright again at 7:30 PM, which gives
me so many more outside activities to put off, which makes me feel pretty good
since I fancy myself a premier procrastinator.
Okay…that was pretty obvious.
But I was meaning to use that one for a while now and I
never got around to it.
I did actually try to research this topic a little, but, Holy Clock Hands, Batman, there’s a lot of confusing history to all of
this.
Apparently, back in the very long ago day, towns just judged
the position of the sun and then set the time to whatever they thought it
should be. 12:00 noon in one town might have been 12:28 in another. Naturally,
this was problematic in that it made it impossible for anyone to ever be on
time for a lunch date.
I guess, back then, without the immediacy of communication
and travel that we have now, it really didn’t matter. It took such a long time
to send a note to your cousin in Boston, from New York, to let him now you were
coming to visit, let alone travel from New York to Boston, that by the time you
got to where you were going, you’d forgotten why you wanted to go there in the
first place, let alone what time it was.
I think Ben Franklin was one of the first folks to consider
the idea of Daylight Savings Time. I’m
not sure if it was his observation, but someone noticed that even though the
sun was up and at ‘em, by 4 or 5 AM,
very few people were. Mostly they were
still huddled in their beds with the shades down doing whatever it was they did
at that hour.
Don’t ask what…just accept it. It’s better that way.
Of course, the farmers were all up and about at that hour,
but no one ever considers the farmers. I guess mostly because they spend so
much time with cows and chickens.
So the progressive thinkers of that era decided why not take
all that unused morning daylight and move it to the evening, where folks can
enjoy it.
Except—again—the farmers, who go to bed early.
This idea was met with great enthusiasm, and while it was
such an obvious improvement, it took several more decades before the idea was implemented,
because no one could figure out how to actually move the daylight to the
evening.
Hey, I said they were progressive
thinkers, not exceptionally bright
thinkers.
Then someone said, probably a woman who never got credit, “Hey, why don’t we just set the clocks ahead
an hour?”
And someone responded, probably a man, who thought he
deserved credit, at least more than he was getting, “That’s so stupid…who’s gonna run around changing all the clocks in
town?”
To which the credit less woman responded, “Everyone can change their own.”
To which the townsfolk, including the women, scratched their
beards, and said, ”Oh yeah…right….”
And that’s how it all began…at least according to me, which
if you try to look it up, makes as much sense as any of the other stories.
Of course no one can ever leave a good idea alone…there’s always
room for improvement.
So it was fiddled with and moved around and even made
permanent a few times, but changed back when people complained about having
lunch before dawn.
When I was a kid we didn’t get the extra light until the 3rd
Sunday in April so it was pretty much a 50/50 split with Standard time. Then
that was moved up a few weeks, in the 80s, until now, where it’s been moved up
again and we pretty much get a 2 to 1 split of extra daylight in the evening.
And everyone seems pretty happy with that, well, again … except
for the farmers.
Okay…time for my nap. I’ve been nothing but tired since I
lost that hour; I’m still trying to catch up.
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What is its effect on "healthy, wealthy, and/or wise? As it relates to farmers?
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