The times, they are a-changin’
posted in Alaska, News |I grew up with Daylight Savings Time. It was just another one of those things that marked the turning of the seasons. I was just used to it, like all the rest of the folks around the U.S. who live with it. I never questioned it, either, just going with the flow. I thought everyone in the U.S. did it, so it was no big deal.
(A lemming. I think that was what I was in a previous lifetime. A lemming.)
Then a buddy of mine–one of those people whose lives are filled with drama, and it turns out that the drama is self-manufactured–moved to Indiana near the border with Michigan. Indiana (or the area of Indiana she lived in) was Daylight-Savings-Time-free; her job, however, happened to be in Michigan, which was not DSTF, so she had the delight of dealing with two separate timezones for her life. Of course, this provided additional fodder for her ongoing lifetime drama. Anyway, this was all very new to me…a place without DST?
Let’s not discuss how I managed to grow up within 20-30 miles of Indiana and never knew that the state didn’t observe DST. Life in a big city can be very parochial at times.
Skip forward a few years, to when the Omegas moved to Arizona.
Arizona is also a DST-free zone. Most of it–the Navajo Indian Reservation uses DST, so you can drive through AZ on one time, drive through the reservation on another time, drive through northern AZ back on the first time, and then out into Utah or Nevada and back into DST.
We had to keep a mental note of whether we were ahead of our friends and family in different states, or at the same time, or behind. OmegaDad’s cute little mnemonic trick was “In the summer, you go to the beach; in the winter, you go to the mountains”. Thus, in the summer, we’d be the same time as California; in the winter, we’d be the same time as Colorado.
We grew quite accustomed to not having to fiddle with the clocks or resetting our internal body clocks. OmegaDotter has never had to deal with it.
So now we’ve moved to Alaska, and back into the land of Daylight Savings Time. Leaving aside the question of why AK bothers to use Daylight Savings Time, and the highly politicized answers and discussions attached to that, there we are, having changed the clocks last week.
This week has been horrid. The dotter, tired enough in the middle of the week already, was practically falling asleep in her ballet class on Wednesday, and did fall asleep one minute after leaving. Worse yet is the fact that the dotter is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.
Let me just repeat that: she is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.
My response, in one word: Grrrr.
In other news: Let’s talk about really sucky people, to wit, a pair of young women (19 and 20 years old) who held up a bunch of Halloween trick-or-treaters at gunpoint and demanded their candy, shooting into the air above their heads. That sucks. Not only does it suck, but it’s stupid–after all, there are plenty of folks (like the Omegas) who will gladly hand out Halloween candy to anyone who knocks at the door if they’re in costume. Not only is it stupid and sucky in that manner, it’s really stupid in general–because the police, contacted by the alert 10-year-olds who memorized the license plate of their truck, searched their homes and found (a) a trick-or-treat bag with the name of one of the victims on it, and (b) $100,000 worth of other stolen goods, thus breaking up a local crime spree that they had been working on for months.
That must have been one terrible Jones for Halloween candy those young women had, is all I can say.
