“What to write for tonight?” he wondered (OK, he is actually me). There’s a war going on, a nasty one too. But I doubt anyone wants to hear about that on Happy Friday!!! I’m praying for Vladimir Putin to eat some toxic Twinkies and keel over with a stroke but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. And yes I know prices on pretty much everything are rather nuts right now, but all I can say about all that is this reminder to all my friends: We are spoiled Americans. We live in a safe place and a free country (so far). “So again,” he wondered, “whatchya gonna write tonight??”
“I know!!” he (OK it’s really me again) exclaimed, “I’ll whine about the loss of an hour of sleep when we change the clock again!!”
So here’s how happy I am about the clock change. Some of you may remember a similar version of this rant from a couple years ago. I apologize for not producing something fresh and twinkly, but my heart really hurts right now for the people of Ukraine.
Anyway, here’s my whining:
Daylight Craving Time – Spring Ahead
Here we go again. An hour of sleep lost in honor of “springing ahead” into Daylight Savings Time. I thought about writing some cockamamie jab at the history of Daylight Saving Time, but there are so many convolutions that I ran away screaming. If you’re really interested in that stuff, Snopes has a pretty good page that describes it all in a nice little nutshell, here:
http://www.snopes.com/science/daylight.asp.
Any who how, even though our biological clocks get their springs and gears all wompified, most of my friends here in Beautiful West Michigan are very OK with the concept of Daylight Saving Time during the summer. I mean, who wouldn’t enjoy having daylight till 10:30 PM? Days are already getting longer, and the birds are playing their electric guitars while squirrels, possums, and racketycoons jump up and down to the beat. Deer are looking at us with that “What??” face while they munch on our lawns. Starlings and grackles empty the bird feeders pretty much as quickly as we can fill them. And yep, pretty soon the peepers will be peeping and the thunder will be thundering.
That’s very nice I’ll say.
However, I’m really sick up and fed with the change. It really seems quite unnecessary, don’t you think? Let’s spring ahead just once and frickin’ leave it that way!! I mean, I need to reiterate how spoiled we are here in Beautiful West Michigan during the summer!! Summer, after all, is my favorite time of year; and we get very long days. I really love being in the garden until it’s too dark to see; and as I mentioned earlier that’s almost 10:30 PM here during part of the warm months.
I try to remind myself of being spoiled, because I’ve experienced the other end of the toaster handle. When I was a kid growing up on Long Island, it was dark outside not too long after we got home from school. In those days, our local fire department touched off a siren every day at precisely 7 PM. Now, when you’re a little kid who has to be heading home “when the 7 o’clock whistle blows,” you still can have lots of fun with hide-and-seek because it’s dark outside at about 5 PM. We’d eat supper, go outside and play, and have gobs of fun running around “at night.” So in that regard, falling back to Standard Time was kinda fun.
I’m a couple days older now, so I’m not really a fan of changing the clocks at all. I’m very OK with living on the far western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, so we can squeeze every last minute of daylight out of the setting sun. Arizona and Hawaii don’t observe all this saving time nonsense. I’d be OK with that, so long as we keep Daylight Saving Time.
Please write to my congressman and woman to make this happen. I’ll give you $3.40 up front for an incentive, and I’ll even bake you an Apple Surprise pie (Surprise!! I put raisins in there too!!). If you can get this done before Sunday, I’ll even make you an Apple Surprise Surprise pie (Raisins and walnuts!!) !!
Well, it’s time for me to quit writing about time now. There was a time though, back in 1973 when I had a very nice time, listening to these guys. All I could say then (and all I can say now), was WOW!!