Where the heck was I before I got all political for a few days?

Well, hey, last week the sun was not coming up until I got about halfway to work in the morning. This week, I keep thinking that the sun will go down as I am just about in my driveway. It hasn’t happened yet but it will soon. Of course, it is my GPS that tells me when the sun rises and sets by turning light or dark. The sun rose at 7:16 and set at 5:20 today.

I am one of those weird people who doesn’t mind the time changes. I was thinking our change to DST originally had something to do with farmers but maybe not so much and here’s an interesting history of daylight time from timeanddate.com.

That said, in the 20th century and maybe especially the 21st century, I’m not sure DST is relevant any more. When I was a kid, the issue was framed by by energy conservation. I don’t know if turning on more lights, etc., in the morning balances out turning on more lights in the evening. At this time of year, in the Great Soon-to-be-maybe-White North, we are dark so much of the time, I’m not sure it matters when the sun rises or sets.

When I was a “kid” in the *eastern* yooperland, for some bizarre reason, the Powers-That-Be decided that we were more aligned with Wisconsin than our lower peninsula (why?) and they changed us to the Central time zone for a year. Oh man, that was a “wonderful” year during which the sun didn’t rise in the eastern yooperland in the winter until after 9 AM and, since I had to be at high school for what they called Zero Hour, you know I walked across the tundra at the end of Superior Street (my street) in total darkness. I sometimes hitched a ride with The Commander, who taught at my high school then. But I didn’t always want to ride with my mom. Even then I enjoyed walking in the dark. But not on the days when it was 32 degrees below zero. But I still did it.

But still, no one (including me) in the eastern yooperland enjoyed waiting until after 9:00 AM for the sun to rise and that ridiculous decision was reversed the next year (some counties in the western end of the yooperland are in the Central time zone and always have been (look at a frickin’ map!)). I dunno what kind of changes might be upcoming about time zones but I sincerely hope that people will carefully analyze how those changes will affect people in various time zones.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2018 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.