Change For Time

A few rants on the time change this weekend.

If you are finding yourself running late today, check your clocks. According to the new law passed by congress a few years ago, Daylight Savings Time goes into effect on the 2nd Sunday in March and ends on the 1st Sunday in November. (Unless you live in Arizona, Hawaii, or parts of Indiana, where they sell clocks without mechanisms to change them). This has been a public service message from Totally Gruntled!

Okay, so why the change, why do we change and why do we need change? If I were king of the world, we would always have daylight until at least 7 or 8 PM. It gets extremely dreary in the winter when it starts getting dark before 5.

Now I've always lived around the same latitude (~40 N), even though I've changed my latitude a few times, but the time changes always mess me up. My days of daylight always seem to go from about 9 hours around Christmas to 15 hours on July 4th, which come to think of it is pretty ideal. Those poor folks on the top of the world, get all their daylight at once about 6 months of it, followed by 6 months of near dark, (I would love to experience near 24 hours of light just once in my life sometime). Those people of middle earth, also known as being on the equator, pretty much get 12 hours of daylight followed by 12 hours of night every day. Can you say B-O-R-I-N-G?

I've been in Montana and Minnesota around the summer solstice and it's weird but cool to have the sun still out at 9:30 or 10:00 PM. I've also been in Minnesota at the Winter Solstice, and it's not cool to have less than a full workday of sun. Literally driving to and from work in the dark is downright depressing. In fact the first time I worked in Minnesota, I drove the same route to work for about 5 months before I realized I was passing some tall buildings on the way, until DST went into effect and I could actually see them in daylight!

Well, that's enough time spent on the time change. Check your clocks, some of them may have moved automatically ahead, because they know about the time change, and others won't. Still others will think they are supposed to move ahead an hour on April 5th, because that used to be the law, so just remember you may have to check them again, or you could be different and just run an hour ahead of everyone else.

Stay Gruntled and enjoy the rest of your weekend.