“Spring Forward” snuck up on me this year, don’t know about the rest of you. I’ll bet that some far-off day, given the lack of conclusive evidence that DST saves significant amounts of energy, we’ll decide that the negatives from the disruption of our sleep patterns far outweighs any positive benefits of a time change.
That said, it’s been years since any of my computers haven’t made the time switch seamlessly, and like most of us, I have a lot more computers in my house than I used to, so there’s that.
MikeJ
I’m thrilled DST is back. Football starts at 7am instead of 6, and if I decide to cook something on the grill tonight I’ll be able to see it.
MattF
Twice a year, I rediscover that my microwave demands the day, month, and year in order to reset the clock. And you can’t just enter 99/99/99– it’s too smart for that old trick. Bah.
Johannes
Congrats on the promotion, Your Eminence! Don’t discipline the sacraments too hard, now.
c u n d gulag
Last night, I changed every clock in the house.
EXCEPT MINE!!!
I woke up thinking it was 7am (late for me), made some coffee, turned on MSNBC, and said to myself, “Hmm… Since when did Chris Hayes’ show start at 7?”
Then, I looked at the converter, and saw it was 8:15.
What a putz!
MomSense
Teenager picked the worst possible night to stay out too late so the hour we lost felt more like 4. Ugh.
Going to try and take a long walk and hope the sunshine will help but first I’m going to wake up the teenager in an obnoxious fashion.
forked tongue
As a sufferer of pretty severe SAD who can barely get out of bed when he knows it’s just going to get dark again at 4:30 PM, it drives me relatively crazy when people bitch about DST.
Zam
They closed the bars an hour early last night. It was horrible.
Ted & Hellen
Being a person who doesn’t become fully functional until long past 10am, I love DST for its long, light-filled evenings.
Ultraviolet Thunder
I have a 6:00 am flight tomorrow morning. That means I’ll be getting up at 3:00 am, which will feel like 2:00 am. Yeah, this didn’t happen at a good time.
Southern Beale
I thought one of the big points of DST was to give farmers more daylight to work in the fields or some such nonsense.
c u n d gulag
I’m suprised Paul Krugmans head didn’t explode this morning, seeing not only the usual idiot, George Will, on George Vowel-a-lot-alous’s show, but the new mega-idiot, that rich motherfeckier, Senator Ron Johnson.
OY!
Phylllis
I’ve begun emulating what I’ve heard the Brits do and resetting the clocks on Friday night in the Spring, since the ‘spring forward’ seems to mess me up the most. Having that extra day to adjust before heading back to work on Monday has helped a lot.
Southern Beale
I like having it lighter in the dinner hour, makes me feel inspired to take the dogs for long after dinner walks, as opposed to curling up on the sofa in front of the TV
Southern Beale
It’s going to be 72 today. A quick warm-up and then it gets cold again. I cleaned out the pond filter, swept up old leaves, and put some pre-emergent out. I’m ready for it to get warm and stay warm.
Ultraviolet Thunder
CHIPMUNK SIGHTING! Looked out the kitchen window just now and there it was, basking in the sun with cheek pouches packed with bird seed.
I saw a crocus yesterday so now it’s officially Spring.
And hooray for that.
TaMara (BHF)
@Phylllis: I was so tempted to do that this year. Next year…
TaMara (BHF)
Once I adjust though…cycling after work, baby!
Southern Beale
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
Our cat brought one to the door last week we thought it was dead and just as the husband bent down to pick it up to discard the carcas the little sucker went full-Lazarus on us and sprang to life. Hilarious. Scared the crap out of us.
Mike in NC
@c u n d gulag: Jeb is on “Face the Republicans” to announce that he’s running for president, but he’ll also give due consideration to being selected the next pope.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@Southern Beale:
We have 5 varieties of squirrels in the yard and the chipmunks are our favorite. I don’t mind the pilfered bird seed. They’re so cute! When they appear I know Spring is here to stay.
Nylund
I’d have no problem with not switching the clocks as long as the time we stuck with was DST. I dislike “real” time. It gets dark too early!
Todd
I’m watching one of those dumb SyFy movies where the world is ending. Actually it is in its second two hour part.
I’m so embarrassed.
TooManyJens
Count me in as another one who wants it to be DST the entire year. I don’t care that it would be dark late into the morning in winter, because I’m pretty much just trying to survive for the first few hours after waking up anyway. It would be really nice to have it still be light out when I’m leaving work and picking my kid up from school, though.
Rosie Outlook
Now that we have DST 8 1/2 months out of the year, why not just stay on it permanently? Even when it was only half the year I thought it was in the wrong half, it should be in the winter. That’s when it gets dark at five in the afternoon, that’s when you want more daylight.
malraux
@Southern Beale: Farmers do work more based on the sun. DST only matters when you have an external person saying to be somewhere at 2:00.
Schlemizel
@Southern Beale:
Ours did that but managed to get the bugger into the house as the wife was walking out. It took quiet a bit of rodeo work to herd the thing back outside and the cat was not the least bit helpful in the effort!
We never allow our cats to go outside alone in large part to avoid having them kill things needlessly but they still can get into trouble.
mouse tolliver
Remember that Fox News reporter, Steven Crowder, who got beaten to a pulp by Union Thugs™ at a right to work protest? Yeah, not so much. After reviewing unedited footage of the altercation, the prosecutor decided not to file criminal charges.
They didn’t come right out and say it, but strongly implied that the Fox Newser is a lying liar who lies. The footage that ran on a loop on FNC and then got picked up by the scolds at MSNBC who should know better by now was edited to mislead. The union protesters got O’Keefe’d by a professional victim who purposely picked a fight so he could go on TV and whine about getting in a fight.
Too little too late though, because the Fox News crew got to whine about Union Thuggery™, and nobody’s doing any followup reporting on their total lack of credibility.
bemused
@Nylund:
Yes, I am an advocate for DST year round. I hate, hate it when it gets dark by 4pm in the winter.
Cacti
The lack of DST in Arizona is one of the few things I think they get right.
JoyfulA
Maybe 20 years ago, there was a move to make DST permanent. Suburban moms raised a fuss that then their kids would have to wait for the schoolbus in the dark, which squelched permanent DST.
Is there some good reason that school systems can’t change their hours? In my opinion, the school day starts and ends too early anyway.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Todd: Your watching pays for the good shows. They couldn’t show Warehouse 13 without your contribution. Keep watching.
Lee
It actually increases your utility bills by around 6%.
Study in Indiana
may
Without DST the sun would rise at 3 AM around the solstice. I need DST or a new time zone down east.
SectionH
It would be fine with me if we just left the clocks this way from now on. I hate the early dark of winter.
Right now, though, an hour one way or the other is pretty small beer. Mr S and I are dealing with my elderly aunt who is in the beginning of the last stage of Parkinson’s. Either he or I has been up 4 times a night for the last few weeks to get her to the bathroom or whatever, and the sleep deprivation is taking a toll. It’s like having a new baby, but with a lot heavier lifting. We are doing our best not to have to put her in a nursing home, at least until she’s so gaga it won’t make any difference, which could be in months, or never.
Schlemizel
@may:
TIme zones would be better if they took latitude into account. The daylight thing was much much less of an issue when we lived in Florida. the rising & setting sun did not vary that much over the course of the year.
Living at 45 degrees lat however means huge differences.
different-church-lady
I find it odd that the time shifts in April and October used to hit me pretty hard — I could count on being a bit depressed for a good week at each change.
But then, after the recent shift to March and November, I started taking them in stride. I can only guess that early March is too early for my brain to have a re-established a relationship to the sun and outdoors, and November is too late to care.
c u n d gulag
@Mike in NC:
Please let him be the next Pope.
He’ll do a lot less harm there, than here.
The Bush’s are kind of America’s Borgia’s, anyway.
Gex
Honestly, if you live as far north as I do, you’d be glad of it. No one needs the sun rising at 4 am and setting at 8 pm. 5 am and 9 pm is much nicer.
From what I gather, the barbeque and other summer recreation industries benefit from having that hour of daylight in the evening instead of before people wake up. Which, given the energy aspects, probably costs more energy than it saves.
Davis X. Machina
Secondary school day start-times are driven by the resulting day end-times, and those are predicated on sports practice schedules.
The first scheduled HS/MS pickup in my district is 6:19 AM, for a 7:15 arrival. The 7:30 AM start time means a school day that ends at 2:00. Home games and practices (in theory) can’t be scheduled before 3:00, leaving time for after-school extra help, make-up, etc, but even then every week we have up to five or six team buses leaving between 1:15 and 2:00 on a daily basis for the more distant away games.
Back when more kids had after-school jobs, there was push-back from the business community against ending the day any later than 2:00, as well.
Elementary has a different dynamic. The little ones are supposed to be picked up before the last adult in the house goes to work, so that if there’s a problem, the kid’s not stranded till 5:00 or 6:00. (Usually kid misses bus, gets driven to school by an otherwise outbound adult.)
In addition after-school care provisions are easier to make for the really young ‘uns, and unsupervised at-home (latch-key time) is minimized by starting and ending elementary as late as feasible.
SectionH
@JoyfulA: Saw a piece last night at a site called Brain Pickings which suggested that starting school later in the day would benefit kids because they are commonly time-shifted to later in the day than adults. Inelegant link here:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/11/internal-time-till-roenneber/
Davis X. Machina
@may: Angus King, when governor, wanted to put Maine on Atlantic time…
Eric U.
calendar on my phone has a bug where it loses or gains an hour if the time change happens between when you set the appointment and when it happens. I finally realized it when I was an hour late and then, 6 months later, an hour early for appointments to the same provider. They must just save a time difference instead of a date/time.
Phylllis
@JoyfulA: Is there some good reason that school systems can’t change their hours? In my opinion, the school day starts and ends too early anyway.
There are a number of districts across the country who have pushed back the start time of their high schools, with dramatic results. 200-point increases in SAT acores, and tardies/truancy/dropout rates becoming almost non-existent.
Gex
@Phylllis: Fascinating. I’m going to have to Google that. If you have a handy link, I’d love to get it from you.
shortstop
I love love love DST. It’s a gift of extra evening light in the best part of the year: summer! And I get up early and do my best work in the early morning, too, but I don’t need it to be light for that.
shortstop
Not trying to be insensitive, but dude, it’s one hour one day a year. Does it really take a lot of people that long to adjust? Am I just one of the lucky ones?
Phylllis
@Gex: Here’s a couple: ; .
I can’t remember where I found the 200-point SAT gain info-I’ve got it in my grants research file at work.
ETA: Ok, apparently link-fu is on the fritz today. Or FYWP, whichever works.
Phylllis
I’ll try it this way: </a
ETA: I give up. If you google delayed high school start times improvement, you'll get a number of links to studies.
JoyfulA
@SectionH: I’ve read about that before, that teenagers are natural night owls prevented from doing their best by school district cultural norms. So why not change the norms instead of berating teens for centuries?
JoyfulA
@Phylllis: Why don’t our so-called school reformers zero in on this factor?
Answering my own question: No profit to be made.
Gex
@JoyfulA: If you haven’t noticed, our Judeo-Christian culture likes to fight human nature. Don’t have sex! Definitely don’t have gay sex!
If we think something is hard and builds character and is “the right way” we don’t really care if it runs counter to how human beings work.
J.D. Rhoades
@Gex:
It’s the Calvin’s Dad Theory of Administration.
Phylllis
@JoyfulA: And because too many schools are designed around what’s convenient for adults rather than what’s best for kids.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@JoyfulA:
True. Teenagers need up to 9 hours of sleep every night. And their brains don’t reach peak operating condition until late morning, halfway through the school day. School day scheduling is dumb but it’s arranged for the convenience of adults rather than the kids’ best interests.
Davis X. Machina
@Phylllis: By high school, though, the schedule is designed around the kids’ best interest, as defined by the kids — participation in sports, after-school employment, and maximal time hanging out, or at home in front of the Xbox, all have substantial constituencies in the affected community. I expect taken together, they make up a majority of the student body.
We have faced our most vocal opposition to schedule changes from kids, not parents or adults in the community.
chopper
@Ted & Hellen:
you become fully functional?
Todd
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I always like the fact that when the world is ending, the President is always coiffed, in suit and tie, as are all his advisors. This despite the notion that folks have been working around the clock for four days.
There’s always the obligatory attempt to nuke the problem, which fails, setting forth the dramatic trip to the center of the problem by some PhD whose kids are in personal danger. There’s always a hot scientist chick love interest, too.
Todd
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I always like the fact that when the world is ending, the President is always coiffed, in suit and tie, as are all his advisors. This despite the notion that folks have been working around the clock for four days.
There’s always the obligatory attempt to nuke the problem, which fails, setting forth the dramatic trip to the center of the problem by some PhD whose kids are in personal danger. There’s always a hot scientist chick love interest, too.
Todd
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I always like the fact that when the world is ending, the President is always coiffed, in suit and tie, as are all his advisors. This despite the notion that folks have been working around the clock for four days.
There’s always the obligatory attempt to nuke the problem, which fails, setting forth the dramatic trip to the center of the problem by some PhD whose kids are in personal danger. There’s always a hot scientist chick love interest, too.
CT
How are the high school kids getting to school at, say, 10am, when parents have to be at work well before then? What about sports practices starting at 5:30 and going until 7 or 7:30, followed by dinner at 8, and settling in to start any homework at 8:30 or 9? Who’s helping those kids with their homework-the parents who have to get to bed by 10 to get 7-8 hours of sleep?
I know not everyone does sports, but add in music or drama, and that’s a lot of kids, and at the school I teach at, those extracurriculars are a huge factor in keeping some of them in school.
Howard Beale IV
I had to work this morning to make sure the rubber bands didn’t come off the airplanes (figuratively speaking, of course)
gelfling545
I hate DST. It’s going to take me at least 2 weeks and more like 3 or 4 to start feeling human again. In EST the time I have to get up is the time I naturally wake up. DST wrecks all that.
gelfling545
@Davis X. Machina: What they like and what they need are not necessarily the same, just like most of us.
NCSteve
My sleep patterns break easily. I’m prone to insomnia and telling my body that I need to go to bed at what it insists is 10:00 pm condemns me to the kind of sleep lost normally associated with new born infants. Except that I’m not some mid-twenties kid with mid-twenties stamina.
I hate DST with the burning passion of a thousand suns The Bush/GOP “energy bill” that turned the entire year into a majority DST year, along with giving more tax cuts for our hard pressed oil companies, was emblematic of the aggressively ignorant stupidity and cynically corrupt crony-corporatism about those dark years.
And I totally missed it this year and yet, somehow, accidentally fell into the only way I know of dealing with it–staying up until well past 3:00 and then getting up early so by the time my body says “10:00” it’s also saying “sooo sleeeepy . . .”
The only hard part is avoiding the overpowering urge to take a nap in the afternoon. I find violent video games help get you past the nap crisis.
Yutsano
@Ultraviolet Thunder: Some of us stay functional at that level. I had a recent temporary schedule change that required me to get to work at 8 am. I somehow managed to stay functional for this, but it was not anywhere near close to my best work. That’s why I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep as close to the schedule I have now.
Redshirt
Some truly mixed opinions here! I love this day more than any other because of the joy of a 6:45 sunset. I was dealing with 3:45PM sunsets not too long ago, which is just depressing.
I’m feeling the energy of Spring! Though of course still buried under 3 feet of snow.
kc
@JoyfulA:
Maybe that won’t matter as much now, because most of the suburban moms chauffeur their kids to school in SUV’s. Or so it seems when you drive past a school in the am and see the mile- long line of SUV’s . . .
Citizen_X
I hate DST, and would just as soon be rid of it.
Hell, I think that, since we all have these computers in our pockets and cars and what not that could easily keep track, we ought to go back to local, astronomical time. You know, where noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, morning and afternoon get equal amounts of daylight, and the town a hundred miles west is a minute behind you.
Kineslaw
I predict a shift in how we talk about DST from energy benefits to obesity reduction benefits. DST clearly does not save energy, but having the extra daylight seems to help people be more active in the evening.
It wouldn’t surprise me if we end up with permanent DST based on a lifestyle rationale.
Tehanu
@Rosie Outlook:
What I’d like to see is, next fall, move the clocks back a half-hour — and then no more changes, ever. The aggro of the twice-a-year having to get used to the change is what really sucks.
shortstop
@Redshirt: I’m tapping into your energy, darling. It’s pouring rain here, but that’s just fine with me, because it’s melting all the snow away. Drip! Drip! Drip!
Davis X. Machina
@gelfling545: Education management went over to the consumer satisfaction model about twenty years ago.
Mo
As a kid growing up in Europe, I didn’t mind at all walking to school in the dark by myself (in reality with other kids). American mothers would freak out.
Redshirt
@shortstop: I’m feeling your energy! And channeling it towards great Gaia in the sky!
Davis X. Machina
@Mo: Nobody walks to school. Centralization and sprawl have seen to that, wherever paranoia hasn’t.
(‘Nobody’ meaning ‘white people with kids’. To walk you need to live in a city, or an inner-ring/streetcar suburb.)
NotMax
@Davis X. Machina
In that case, I must be hallucinating the backpack-wearing entities tramping along on on the street edge (no sidewalks) each weekday, as well as the crossing guard stationed at the intersection just up the street.
Maeve
I {> daylight savings time – because in the middle of summer the sun in SE Alaska rises at 4:00 am and sets at 10:00 pm – and if we didn’t have daylight savings it would be 3:00 am and 9:00 pm
Those early morning hours would be a waste (and in fact I have to get blackout curtains to shut the light out) but I loves the long evenings. The cruise ships have sailed away for the evening and we still enjoy the outdoors even during the workweek.
This is because SE Alaska is geographically in the Pacific time zone but chronologically in the Alaska time zone.
So one function of daylights savings is to shift the daylight to evening – which has a sociological function even if it doesn’t save energy.
Davis X. Machina
@NotMax: How old is the school? What was the town’s population in 1965? In 1995?
At my school there are 17 houses within 1 1/2 mile radius, and that’s why the school is where it is — legal walking distance. Closure of old schools due especially to asbestos, 1980’s-era school consolidation, and the need for cheap land for parking and playing fields, dictate building schools precisely where the children aren’t.
Mnemosyne
@Kineslaw:
Even though the time change usually messes me up for at least a week, I’m super-excited this year that it means I can start riding my bike to work again as early as next week (I’m reluctant to ride it in full dark as long as my city continues to have one of the highest car-vs-pedestrian death rates in the entire country).
Plus G is saying that he will be able to start taking walks after work again because he won’t be quite as nervous about being stalked by our many local coyotes. So I can see that there are fitness benefits to the time change.
@NotMax:
I think your entire state probably counts as an “inner-ring” suburb. Here on the mainland, almost everyone drives their kids to school, especially if they’re in suburbs where the schools were built on the opposite side of a four-lane highway. We’re working on it, but it’s a trudge.
Mnemosyne
@Mo:
For first through third grades (so about ages 6 to 8), I walked about a mile to school, stopping to get my older cousins about halfway through. I can’t imagine any modern American parent allowing that these days, but in the 1970s, it was just not a big deal.
NotMax
@Davis X. Machina
The elementary school is about 40 years old; the Jr./Sr. High School was opened in ’95 (to one grade only, a grade was added as building continued for the next several years).
Population of this particular town now is around 7500 (High School serves an area whose total population is around 22,000); in ’65, don’t know, but was probably less than 1000, as it was primarily farmland then.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Just put the country on permanent DST and stop jerking my internal clock around. It was fine when I was a kid; not so fine anymore now that I’m closing in on fifty. I feel like shit today.
shortstop
@Davis X. Machina: I take your point and I do not wish to mire myself in literalism, but there are actually quite a lot of walking white people living in big cities. Mine, for example, is 32 percent non-Hispanic white, 33 percent black, 29 percent Hispanic/Latino origin and 5 percent Asian. That’s not even touching inner-ring ‘burbs.
Jebediah
@Mnemosyne:
I had a shorter walk, probably between a quarter and a half mile, at about the same age and era (back in Massachusetts.)
I now live about a quarter mile from an elementary school, and I do see kids walking to school, but not kids as young as you and I were when we were walking to school.
And of course the kids these days, they don’t have to walk uphill both ways like we did…
John
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Not unless you’re a Nielsen household it doesn’t.
Starlit
@Southern Beale: You are a pond person also? Awesome. My filter quit while I was heads-down in a work mess. Now I have green water, but also many sacs growing froglets and dragonfly nymphets. I’m hoping turning things back on doesn’t muck up the Circle of Life too much.
lawguy
I had read that the Soviet Union was on permanent daylight savings time, and now it no longer exists. Coincidence? I think not.
Djur
@CT: The homework problem is eliminated by eliminating homework.
@Mnemosyne: I started walking to school in third grade, which would have been 1996, if I have the math right. That was about three-quarters of a mile, pretty clear down a busy street. Middle school was about the same distance in the opposite direction, and high school was about a mile away. This is all in a moderately high-SEC neighborhood fairly close to the middle of a medium-size Western city (Portland).
Not too long ago I was walking around that area early on a weekday and I saw crossing guards from the elementary school. In this case, we’re talking older kids (4th and 5th grade) not too far away from the school. They didn’t appear to be supervised, but I can’t imagine there wasn’t an adult lurking nearby (maybe watching from a house). So at least some places parents still aren’t hyper-paranoid about their kids.
Hunter
Given that I still haven’t found January or February, losing an hour in March is inconsequential.