3/09/08

Sunday, 8:20 AM CDT; 5 degrees, wind ENE, calm. Barometer predicts sunny skies, which are presently clear with scattered, high thin white and gray clouds and some haze on the eastern horizon which somewhat dims the rising sun.
“Spring ahead, fall behind,” I’ve finally got it straight, late in life. But it 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. The atomic clock does make it easier and less likely to forget, as long as someone adjusts it somewhere up on Cloud Nine or wherever it occurs.
We heard a news anchorwoman say last night, “It will be nice to have more daylight.” Someone should tell her that there is the same amount of daylight, set by the sun, whether there is daylight savings time or not.
Some years ago a visiting Russian scientist told us that one of the time zones (I believe nine time zones in Russia) during WWII went on daylight saving time with the rest of the country, but some apparatchik forgot to turn the clock back in the fall, then the next spring the zone’s clocks were set ahead again, and then there were two hours of daylight savings time. It happened again the next year and 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. As the old saying goes, “It isn’t nice to fool Mother Nature.” Go to bed early tonight.