Saturday, March 01, 2008

Walking in the Dark

Whoever thought up this starting of daylight savings time earlier, and lasting longer, certainly never consulted mothers of young public-school-aged children. When my daughter still went to public school, I would fervently long for daylight savings to be over so I could walk her to her bus stop in the daylight. We used to have to use a flashlight, for crying out loud, to see our way to our rural waiting post. At least we were in a slightly civilized neighborhood; I feel doubly sorry for those whose houses are all by themselves surrounded by trees and who-knows-what animals.

And now they want me to start getting up in the dark again! Ok, so I don't have to walk her to a bus stop anymore, but others do. I just happen to like to wake up when there's at least a glimmer of dawn on the horizon. Sheesh, March 9th??? Give me a break!!

Maybe we should all move to Arizona.

3 comments:

Tony M said...

Thanks for the reminder...

Yeah, Arizona is better - I'm currently working on a system for the Palo Verde nuclear generating station and thought, "lucky guys, no DST!" I've wondered for a long time why they keep on insisting on this DST thing. It makes things tough on recordkeeping on computers, too, especially when they change the rules (like the earlier/later thing). There are a handful of other places in the US that don't observe DST, too.

Anyway, just got back from our AWANA Grand Prix (pinewood derby races) - probably the biggest "production" of the year for us at AWANA (we set up scaffolding at the end of the track to act as a "tower" where the announcer and I stand, and put a screen on the front of the scaffolding, and we have a race timer connected to my laptop running the software I wrote to read the timer results and display the actual and scaled speeds, time, etc. - but that software is going to change significantly for next year; it's been tweaked over the last few years, but we're changing the way we want to run the races, requiring a complete overhaul, and we want to incorporate some other changes as well). I'm tired from all the climbing up & down the scaffolding, not to mention tearing everything down & cleaning up immediately afterwards so the space can be used for our church services tomorrow.

So, goodbye for now...

clstarr88 said...

Yeah, it's pretty good here in Arizona. It's nice when the sun goes down early in the heat of the summer. But I did have to buy heavy dark curtains for the bedroom so the sun doesn't wake me up at 5am in the summer. Although Chet likes to wake up at 5am, so it's good for him.

Hence said...

The sun rises at 5? Oh my. Maybe a June through August DST would be good in that case.

Just not Mar through Nov.