My favorite day of the year is rapidly approaching. That would be the day of the Winter Solstice, when the days start to get longer. At least in the middle of northern hemisphere where I live.
My used-to-be favorite day was the day DST started. Now it has been extended from some time in March until early November. Only when this happened did I start to ask, Why?
I always thought that the idea of DST was to give farmers more daylight hours to harvest crops. Now from what I read, the idea was to conserve energy, so that people used less incandescent light. Really? What is wrong with this picture, logically speaking? You use artificial light in the morning, you use it in the evening. What’s the difference? Did farm wives cook breakfast in the dark? I don’t think so.
Why don’t we just measure time naturally, by the way the Earth turns? Since we sort of invented time anyway, why don’t we just stick to the program we agreed on in the beginning and stop messing with it?
I more or less hate real time. In real time, it gets dark this time of year around 5:30 P.M. In summer, it gets dark at 9:00 P.M. Which is due to DST, because it adds an hour. Otherwise, it would be dark at 8:00 P.M.
I ask you: what difference does that really make? You either get up in the dark, or you go to bed in the dark, and sometimes both. Making the clock say a different thing is really pointless.
I have a lot of trouble with DST. I’m fairly good with the “fall back” part when we get an extra hour of sleep, but I’m terrible with the “spring forward” part when we lose an hour of sleep. Regardless of whether we are on DST or standard time, here is something you can count on: I will always be late for work.
In summer, I can come home from work and have three hours to read and watch the wildlife in my back yard. And decompress. In winter, I come home and it’s already too dark to read outside. Also, it’s too cold to sit at the picnic table in my back yard, but cold isn’t as much of an issue to me as light.
I need light. I need warm too (that’s why I live in Florida).
But north Florida is not as warm as I’d like. (Into every life, a little rain must fall.) I used to live in south Florida, and in the winter it was too cold for me too. I need to live in like, Guatemala. I wonder if they have DST?
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