Monday, April 7, 2014

Daylight Saving Time - Again?




During his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin made eight voyages across the Atlantic Ocean.  He had a lot of time on his hands.  So, he put his natural curiosity to work and, as a result, he managed to invent quite a few things.  Like bifocals. And a more efficient wood burning stove to provide heat – and the first fire company and fire insurance company, just in case something went wrong, I suppose.  He invented that famous lightning rod, of course.  On his way to starting the postal service, he invented an odometer to measure the routes.  And, in the middle of all that inventing, he found a little time to scatter some seeds of the American Revolution.  Unfortunately, dear old Ben also came up with the idea of daylight saving time during one of his trips to Paris. He wrote and published an essay titled “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light” where he proposed to save on the use of candles by rising earlier and making the most of the morning sunlight.  And, as far as I am concerned, that cancels out all the good stuff.  Daylight Saving Time is what my grandmother would refer to as cutting off one end of the blanket and sewing it on the other end to make it longer.

It has been a month since we began Daylight Saving Time again. My body is still in rebellion mode.   I do not like it.  I do not like it at all.  That extra hour of sunlight in the afternoon doesn’t mean anything good to me.  It messes up my life.  By the time it is dark and I want to sit down and read, it is time to go to bed.  When it is time to get up and get ready for work, it is still dark.  My dogs don’t understand it.  They don’t seem to like getting up two hours before the sun, but they do it because I get up and they seem to be of the opinion that I cannot fix breakfast without their supervision.  I whine and complain about Daylight Saving Time until I get that hour back.  I want to be like the Free State of Arizona.  They have the good sense to ignore Daylight Saving Time.  They do not fiddle with the clocks and try to fool themselves into thinking they have more than twenty-four hours in a day. 

The first week of that dreaded DST is always the hardest for me.   I am all out of whack and out of sorts and out of patience.  It is uncommonly difficult.  On my way to work during that appalling first week, God sent me a reminder to count it all joy.  I looked in the mirror on the way to work and guess what I saw. 

This.

Yep.  God sent me a sunrise.  It felt like He was saying, “Enough, already!”   I had to smile.  That’s just like God to care about my bad-tempered, crabby self enough to send me a sure-fire cure. 

The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.  Psalm 65:8

No comments:

Post a Comment