I love this time of year. So what if we lose an hour. I’d gladly take the extra daylight we are going to get over a loss of one hour of sleep or something. Every year it’s the same thing about DST and I really have to wonder why people get so uptight about it. Personally, I wish we would be in Daylight Time year round, but I know we can’t so I’m used to it. I just love the fact that for more than half the year, we have more daylight in the evenings. It’s a beautiful thing.

There are a couple of minor annoyances to changing the clocks that haven’t been mentioned.

One is that I happen to have two atomic clocks that keep time great except for twice a year. They have a chip inside that changes the time based on the “old” daylight and standard time change dates. I guess no one figured on the government stepping in to change these.

I’ve found a “workaround” to this problem, though: tonight I’ll change the time zones on these clocks to Eastern, which is an hour ahead of us. That way the time will be correct tomorrow, since it won’t change automatically at 2 a.m. On the first Saturday night of April, I’ll change the time zones back to Central. At 2 a.m., my clocks will automatically set ahead an hour.

It’s annoying, but it works; and I don’t want to buy new clocks because the government decided we needed to change these dates to “save” money. Of course, we save a ton of money; that’s why the U.S. economy is in such great shape!

The other minor problem is that it’s not as light in the monning now. Of course, if you get up after 7 a.m., it doesn’t really matter. I happen to leave for work at 6:30, so the lighter mornings have been nice. Oh well, the days are getting longer anyway, so this won’t really affect anyone for very long.

I like the lighter evenings, too!

We’d be clubbing on saturday until 3 or 4am, get home for 5 or 6, then have to be at work on sunday morning for 9:30.

Ah happy days. How the hell did we used to do that?

…But that’s the overelaborate way of saying we were just too lazy to reset our clocks, and we were oblivious to the fact that our neighboring States couldn’t figure out what time it was supposed to be here.

Now that we finally settled on joining the Eastern time-zone (well, most counties) and we do observe DST, I rather like the extra evening daylight, especially with it lasting to 9:30pm or more in Summer. And as for the “lost hour” in March?

Well, no sleep lost here. As a fella that works an overnight shift Saturday night to Sunday morning, I got to work one hour less. I celebrated vigorously as my 10-hour shift transformed into a 9-hour shift. (But should I have been so happy? Instead of 10 hours in front of my work computer reading Jammer’s Reviews, I only had 9 hours for it.) Indeed, perhaps I can be accused of basking in the joy of the hour-less-of-work with too much vigor; as people who lose the vast 60 minutes of sleep might be, just perhaps, complaining just slightly too much.
For example how many minutes overall- 30, 60, 90?- do some people expend in complaining about the 60 minutes of lost sleep…? Hmmm.

All in all- it does even out, in the end. The hour’s in the bank. We’ll all get it back later in the year. And I’ll get a nice long 11-hour night, hopefully with reviews of BSG season 4 to read (if, aside from ‘Razor’, season 4 ever gets on the air!)

AZ is synced up with the Pacific time zone for half the year (now, that we’ve switched) and Mountain time for the other half. I loathe PST. Suddenly, everything is irritatingly early. Friends on the east coast I could talk with easily enough half the year are now heading out (or asleep) by the time I get off work. Calling the east coast for work (I work at a newspaper) is a nightmare, as I don’t get into the office until their noon and have to scramble to get call-backs from DC or New York before it’s 2 p.m. here. It’s astounding what a cushion an hour gives you. Plus, no one outside AZ ever knows what time it is here. Quite annoying.

I certainly understand why Arizona doesn’t observe DST. No one here wants an extra hour of daylight when July hits and its 120 degrees. But if the government is going to be jiggering with DST in a (misguided, it costs more!) effort to save energy or money, I hope the AZ tradition of non-observance is subject to change.

With hardships like that, I feel it is my duty to whine

my 2 cents