“Remoted” – Day 230 (Sunday)

Over in the stove time zone ...

It is Day One of the autumnal return to Standard Time with the clocks manipulated to “fall back” one hour. The farewell to Daylight Saving Time is met with the semi-annual mental gymnastics tournament where all time is temporarily noted as “new” and “old.” For example, upon arising this morning, the time on the automatically adjusted cell phone/camera/pocket computer was checked and revealed to be 6:50 am, which was mentally logged as “new 6:50, old 7:50” and also, "damn, the dogs slept late." This little game will run its course until routines and appetites are finally readjusted, then will be set aside until it is resurrected in the spring with the regularly scheduled return of Daylight Saving Time and the accompanying spring upheaval. 

While the cell phone magically adjusts its displayed time to the correct hour, the clocks are manually adjusted and resynchronized in the various household time zones. The battery operated wall clocks in the kitchen zone and bathroom zone and the digital stove and microwave clocks all needed adjusting and provided the morning’s entertainment. The thermostat in the dining room zone was dealt with, which requires pulling out the manual and referring to page 7 for the refresher on Honeywell engineering skills. Over in the driveway time zone, the car clock will remain incorrect until it is next driven, but at least the setting of that one was finally mastered, it just took from 2004 until 2014 to figure it out. Though it was still so early in the day that the coffee wasn't even made yet, the dread over the “new” earlier hour when darkness would fall was already seeping in like fog. 

Moose rests after a
successful protest over
the time of dinner. 

It seems it would be so much easier to just let the time be the time and stop dicking around with it twice a year. According to livescience.com, Benjamin Franklin came up with the Daylight Saving Time idea, and it took about a hundred years for it to officially begin. The timing of the time change has been shifted over the years, and in some years didn’t even happen, such as after World War I until World War II. There are some counties in the U.S. and around 60% of the the rest of the world that don’t even bother with this clock changing nonsense. Why not just do a one-time shift of 30 minutes to split the difference between Standard and Daylight Saving and then let it be? Or is this some American rebellion like our holding out against the metric system?

There is an argument (with slim evidence, according to livescience.com) that Daylight Saving Time conserves energy. Maybe in the lightbulb sense, but is it offset by the return to Standard Time? And the semi-annual punishment and mental drain on the population and the accompanying lost productivity don't seem like huge benefits. How many workers drag butt through the workday for a couple weeks while readjusting to the physical effects of the time change? I know I do. And the dogs? They don’t know nor do they care about clocks. They know routine, and at yesterday's old 5:00 pm, today's new 4:00 pm, the two of them were staring at me while Moose, the  Official Spokesdog of the Canine Overlords, was barking to protest the tardiness of dinner. Telling him “it’s not time” didn’t cut it and they were served victory bowls of food at old dinnertime, which is suddenly today's "too early" for dinnertime. What is this human concept of time, anyway? Isn't it just a means to control the masses and maintain order? 

Soup time!

At least my dinner was easy. The dreary weather made for a soup day, and a pot was on the stove, having been started at new 2:15/old 3:15 pm. It was a fun freezer raid that resulted in a hearty soup (maybe even a stew, what is the difference exactly?) of roasted squash, onions, carrots, celery, mixed frozen vegetables, a can of red kidney beans, the comical crop of itty bitty potatoes from the deck planter, and a packet of Lipton Onion and Mushroom soup mix plus the package recommended amount of water. After feeding the dogs at old 5:15, I ladled a bowl of soup for myself and buttered a piece of bread found in the freezer during the earlier treasure hunt for ingredients. It was soup time.