Daylight Shifting

In all 50 times of experiencing daylight savings, this year was the first to get the best of me. We set our cell phone alarm clock, as usual, thinking that since it gets it's time from some magical place that automatically updates it when one crosses time zones, it would be equally effective at updating for daylight savings, as well. Little did we know, and we soon found out, that for some reason, it didn't kick in until 8am pre-daylight savings time, i.e. 9am, which just happens to be what time church starts. Needless to say, we were shamelessly late and had a lovely scape-goat to blame.

Now for my typical pointless criticism about choosing a name like "leap day" or "daylight savings". The annoying word here is savings.

I mean really... who are we trying to kid? How is forcing me to wake up an hour earlier saving me any daylight? The answer is, it's not. The only thing it's saving me from is being well-rested and a happy person to be around. Luckily, I can usually adjust within a couple of days, but regardless, I think a renaming is in order. Because really, all we're doing is shifting the daylight hours in our clock. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be 'daylight shifting time', or 'now-it's-going-to-be-dark-when-you-wake-up-and-make-you-painfully-aware-of-your-
losing-an-hour-of-sleep-last-night,-since-you-couldn't-fall-asleep-at-the-normal-time-
because-it-felt-like-an-hour-earlier day', or maybe 'testing-your-awareness-of-strange-practices-day'. Perhaps the only way the current title makes sense is that the our we in fact lose is actually being stowed away, or 'saved' until fall, when they make it seem like we get a free hour of sleep back.

Wikipedia sheds some interesting light on the purpose of daylight savings (no pun intended) but I'm still unconvinced of its need. Arizona doesn't use it and they seem to be getting along just fine. Way to go AZ. Way to stick it to the man!

On the plus side, my bike light recently broke. Hopefully now I won't need it riding home from my TA session :)

PS this week is my last TA session EVER!