As usual, this time change thing has me completely bamboozled.
Fall forward is my instinct when falling; spring back is my instinct when faced with danger. Therefore, I first debate the whole fall back (or forward?) and spring back (or forward?) thing.
Usually, someone tells me it's fall back, spring forward, which means to move your watch and clocks backwards an hour today, which is also All Hallows' Eve, the liminal time when the boundary between the living and the dead becomes thinner and things get spooky.
But this year I'm driving to Colorado on the weekend that includes the time change crisis.
Therefore, I have more to think about. I'm crossing into the Rocky Mountain time zone (one hour ahead of the Pacific zone where I live). So does 1 hr. ahead + 1 hr. back = zero ---don't do anything?
I think so--except that I already changed my watch, so now I have to change it again, moving it back to California time, aka Rocky Mountain Standard Time.
Except if I'm in Arizona, which goes with California in the summer (I think)--except for the Navajo Nation, which sticks with Colorado--and I think Nevada sticks with Arizona (or is it California?).
But Utah sticks with Colorado and stays on Rocky Mountain time year round, though only a small corner of the state has the Rockies in it. Wikipedia confirms this fact:
https://www.google.com/search?q=rocky+mountains+location&es_sm=93&tbm=isch&imgil=s324k2sX5TmEwM%253A%253BZxh3zV93X_gRWM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.ducksters.com%25252Fgeography%25252Fus_states%25252Fus_mountain_ranges.php&source=iu&pf=m&fir=s324k2sX5TmEwM%253A%252CZxh3zV93X_gRWM%252C_&biw=986&bih=679&ved=0CCkQyjdqFQoTCP7Z9qLF7sgCFQ71YwodIkYCbg&ei=rqk1Vv7KCY7qjwOijInwBg&usg=__2dgjDf_cFEVwkxHnlqZcs3dyNdE%3D#imgrc=s324k2sX5TmEwM%3A&usg=__2dgjDf_cFEVwkxHnlqZcs3dyNdE%3D
Utah mostly looks like Arizona and Nevada, not Colorado, so it's hard to be in SW Utah and go with the time zone belonging to Denver. Nevertheless, I'll buy it. They had to draw the line somewhere.
The really hard part comes in contemplating the whole concept of Daylight Savings Time.
I never understand why we need to save daylight in the summer, when there's plenty of it.
They say saving daylight really has to do with farmers getting up to do work in the summer. Again, for a resident of Los Angeles, understanding farm time logic is a stretch, but if I don't get it, I will never be able to change my clocks in the correct direction with confidence.
Okay, in the summer Standard Time doesn't work for farmers because they don't want to waste any early morning time. If daylight occurs 5 am to 8 pm, and they get up at 6 am to milk cows, they have wasted a whole hour of daylight when they could have done something important outside and there was plenty of light.
So they want the clocks to say 6 am when it's really 5 am. That means that when it's 8 pm, the clocks are going to say it's 9 pm. I guess they want to go to bed at 10 pm when it's really 9 pm.
I myself don't fancy going to bed at 9 pm, summer or winter, standard or daylight time. I tend to waste electricity staying up until midnight whether it's summer or winter, and I wake up with daylight no matter what time the clock says.
Don't get me wrong: I appreciate the sun setting at 9 pm, not 8 pm, in the summer, thanks to daylight savings time. I love those long beautiful evenings.
Nevertheless, if they called it Electricity Savings Time, I could get my mind around it easier. In the summer, we want to get up earlier to take advantage of all those free watts from the sun, so we take 5 am and call it 6 am. In the winter we're not going to have that much sunlight at either end of the day, so it's okay just to go with natural time.
Unless we live in Alaska, in which case---
Does Alaska do daylight savings time in the summer? Or does it try to save daylight in the winter, when there's not much to go around?
Aaaaarghhh!
