Daylight Savings Time

The world is so dreadfully managed,
one hardly knows to whom to complain.
~Ronald Firbank

There isn't enough coffee in Seattle to get us going this week. Our usual early mornings have abruptly become obscenely early mornings. I don't have to leave the house, but poor John has to function at what was 3:45 am just a few days ago. As for how well he functions, who knows? There is no conversation in this house at that hour. Let's just say it's a good thing traffic is light when he heads off to work at 5:20 am. It's no surprise that there's an alarming increase in traffic accidents the Monday morning after the change.

Daylight Savings Time began during WWI as an attempt to save fuel. So why do we still do it? Some people claim they would miss the late evening light, but a similar number of us love the morning light and hate the inconvenience of resetting our body clocks twice a year. As if life isn't difficult enough, Congress passed a law in 2007 starting Daylight Savings time three weeks earlier and ending it one week later.

It takes John a grumpy half-day to reset all the clocks in our house. Apparently it costs U.S. companies billions to reset their automated systems for a change that only puts us more out of sync with the rest of the world time-wise. All for the unproven claim we save energy and "gain" an hour of daylight.