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| DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME, THE ETERNAL MYSTERY |
Wednesday, 8:15 AM: 19 degrees F at the ferry dock, 17 on the back porch. The wind is variable. and calm at present. The sky is clear, the humidity 82%. The barometer is falling, now at 30.46". The forecast is for warmer weather but mostly cloudy and overcast skies, with some intermittent precipitation.
“Spring ahead, fall behind,” I’ve finally got it straight, late in life. But that doesn’t make it any easier, and Daylight Saving Time arrived even earlier this year. Joan and I don’t like it, but it doesn’t seem to bother Lucky who has his own internal clock independent of any human foolishness. He knows when it is time to eat, time to sleep and time to take a pee; he has all of life's essentials covered.
The atomic clock (is it powered by atoms, does it count atoms...what does it do?) does make it easier and more likely to change the clocks in the right direction, as long as someone adjusts it somewhere up on Cloud Nine or wherever it resides. I sure hope nobody hacks into it and scrambles it all up, as we would truly be in trouble then. As the old saying goes, “It isn’t nice to fool Mother Nature.”
We heard someone on TV say, “It will be nice to have more daylight.” Someone should tell her that there is the same amount of daylight, determined by the sun, whether there is daylight savings time or not.
A number of years ago a visiting Russian scientist told me that one of their remote time zones (Russia has 11)) went on daylight saving time with the rest of the country during World War II, but some apparatchik forgot to turn the clock back in the fall, and then the next spring the time zone’s clocks were set ahead again, so there were two hours of daylight savings time. Everyone got so confused they just left it that way, winter and summer. The birch trees didn’t complain and neither did the residents of the gulags.
The Russians are light years ahead of us in one respect at least; they got rid of Daylight Saving Time a few years back.
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