Posts Tagged ‘time change’
|A Hard Day’s Night©2011 Lynn Rebuck
Monday, November 7th, 2011
When is the worst time to have insomnia? The night we switch from Daylight Savings Time. Yes, you guessed it. On the evening when we delight in the fact that we get an extra hour of sleep, I ended up instead with an extra hour of sleeplessness.
It was a hard day’s night.
Everyone experiences an occasional bout of insomnia. I just timed mine wrong and it coincided with the time change.
As I lay awake listening to others snore, I thought about sleep aids. I thought about waking the others to tell them about my insomnia. I wondered if I could list sleep deprivation as a hobby on Facebook.
Here are some of my favorite ways to fall asleep when I’m having trouble dozing off:
- Listen to Enya’s music. I’m not sure what it is about this woman, but she makes me sleepy. I wonder if her New Age household is full of a drowsy spouse and lethargic children. Her CDs should have an advisory label on them: “Do not drive or operate heavy machinery while listening to this music.” Dosage: Start with one track. If still not sleepy after thirty minutes, listen to another track. Prolonged exposure may cause listlessness.
- Watch C-SPAN. Nothing puts me to sleep faster than a hearty dose of televised hearings from the House floor. Listening to the steady drone of elected officials just lulls me to sleep. I’m pretty sure this is how most of the objectionable bills get passed by Congress. Just use caution that you don’t end up watching British Parliament by accident. Watching their energetic interaction with the Prime Minister on the question and answer sessions is the equivalent of drinking three cans of Red Bull.
- Make a list of all the things you need to get done the following day, then hire an assistant to do them.
Here are a couple of interesting sleep-related facts. Reading helps you fall asleep. Men fall asleep faster than women. In fact, statistics show that at least four out of five men fell asleep while reading this column.
The week following the switch from Daylight Savings is the most dangerous week of the year for pedestrians. More pedestrians are hit by motor vehicles during this week than any other. So as you drive and walk around town, please be careful.
I managed to make it through the time change on the heels of arriving in a new time zone. I am already on the appropriate sleep-wake schedule for Malaysia. Unfortunately I am in the middle of the United States.
I have discovered that when it comes to the switch from Daylight Savings, people react in one of three different ways. There are those who set their clocks back Saturday night before they go to sleep, there are those who forget about the time change entirely and arrive everywhere an hour early the following day, and there are those die-hard time change fans who, like me, insist on staying awake until 2 a.m. Sunday morning to usher in the new hour. It’s kind of like New Year’s Eve without all the confetti.
How certain am I that my body will eventually adjust to time change? Well, let’s just say I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
Lynn Rebuck is a national award-winning humor columnist, speaker, and Christian counselor whose column appears weekly in print, online, and on Amazon Kindle. She has six clocks and three watches, none of which are set to the correct time. Email her at Lynn@LynnRebuck.com, fan her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter. © 2011 Lynn Rebuck
Tags: C-SPAN, Clocks, Daylight Saving, Enya, fall back, funny, humor, humorists, insomnia, sleep, time change
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Fall Back, Spring for Words©2011 Lynn Rebuck
Thursday, October 27th, 2011
Some people adjust quickly to the switch to Daylight Saving Time. It usually takes me six months . My body resists the sudden shift. The name even confuses me. How does daylight save time? Is it time for us to contribute to our savings? In other countries, they simply call it “Summer Time.” Go figure.
While most people are aware that the whole concept that daylight could be saved was invented by that irrepressible inventor, Benjamin Franklin, many are unaware that he conceived of the idea after pulling a candle-lit almost-all-nighter in France.
Mr. “a penny saved is a penny earned” Franklin finally crashed at 3 or 4 a.m. after being totally amazed by a new invention being demonstrated on QVC called the “oil lamp”. At 6 a.m. he was so startled by the sunlight streaming into his room that he reasoned, in the midst of his sleep deprivation, that a drop of wax saved is a drop of waxed earned.
Interestingly enough (or not, you decide), Franklin first proposed his radical idea in a letter to the editor. He reasoned that tons of wax and livre (which is books, money, or chopped liver according to my very vague French dictionary) could be saved if the Laissez-faire French would stop sleeping until noon.
He humorously suggested that a cannon be set off on the streets each morning to jolt people to wakefulness. Not a bad idea, especially for today’s hard-to-wake teens. He also suggested a financial penalty for homeowners whose residences had shutters to keep the sunlight out. Today that would be the equivalent of a Levelor levy.
But the time-change concept didn’t go straight from Franklin’s quill to instantaneous world-wide acceptance. People were amused but resistant. In 1907, William Willet, an English builder and the first one with a “Save the Daylight” bumper sticker, proposed the time change but with a more humane transition than the sudden one-hour shift: on each of four consecutive Sundays in April, at 2 a.m., set the clock forward a mere twenty minutes and back in like fashion in the fall.
He was ahead of his time. About twenty minutes ahead. The idea was mocked, dismissed, and eventually passed by legislators. Those time lobbyists were very persuasive.
People used to rely on local time from a town clock like we rely today on the time from our infallible computer screens (mine is still set on Pacific Time).
In the United States the entity that actually drove hardest for the standardization of time was the transportation industry. That was so that in the future airline passengers would eventually know just how late their flights were. To get from one location to another back then often required stopping at more locations with different times than flying on Southwest does today.
Times have certainly changed since Franklin and Willet. We now efficiently light our homes in the evenings with energy-saving 40-inch HD screens tuned to QVC, where tonight they are demonstrating lava lamps. I’ll probably be awake until 3 or 4 a.m.
Lynn Rebuck claims the deadline for this column was 2 p.m. Pacific Time. Email Lynn@LynnRebuck.com (c) 2011 Lynn Rebuck
Tags: Benjamin Franklin, comedy, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, humor, QVC, Seasons, time change
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Springing Forward ©2011 Lynn Rebuck
Friday, March 18th, 2011
The switch to daylight savings time seems much harder this year. Each morning I’m not sure whether to spring forward or fall back to sleep.
My body keeps opting for the latter choice, which makes me late for everything.
I’m trying to comply with the time change. I’ve tried coffee. I’ve tried a cold shower. I’ve even tried drinking coffee in the shower.
I’ve tried setting multiple alarms only to discover that I apparently sleepwalk and turn off multiple alarms.
When I don’t get enough sleep my mind wanders easily and I start wondering about things I don’t normally think about.
I wonder if the woman who does the correct time recordings ever loses track of time.
I wonder if the people who make Timex watches have to set them all forward an hour every spring.
I wonder if the official NFL timekeeper is ever late for work.
A trust issue has developed between me and my body. Ever since the time change it feels I’ve been deceiving it.
As a graduate student in Marriage and Family Therapy I have learned about different therapeutic approaches to working with couples and families. One of my favorites is a method called Solution Focused Brief Therapy, a model that uses certain key questions. I decided to apply some of the questions to the time change issue.
“When did the problem start?”
“It started this past Sunday at 2 a.m.”
“What have you tried so far?”
“Coffee, cold showers, hot coffee in a cold shower.”
“How has it worked?”
“Was I on time for this appointment?”
“No.”
“There’s your answer.”
“If you woke up tomorrow morning and this was no longer a problem, how would you know it?”
“Yes, exactly. I’d know it.”
“Maybe I’m not being clear. If you woke up tomorrow morning and this was no longer a problem, how would you know it?”
“I’d wake up.”
“Yes, that’s right. If you woke up and it was no longer a problem, how would you know it?”
“That’s how. I’d wake up.”
“I see. What else have you tried?”
“We’ll, I (more…)
Tags: Daylight Savings Time, humor, marriage and family therapy, parenting, Seasons, solution focused brief therapy, solution focused therapy, spring, spring forward, time change
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Fast Time and Fast Food ©2010 Lynn Rebuck
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
I have long admired the Amish. Recently, I learned yet one more reason to respect them: some pay no mind to Daylight Saving Time.
A friend who used to drive for the Amish (a car, not a team of mules) told me that when arranging pickup times, the Amish would inquire whether the pickup time she stated was “fast time” or “slow time.”
Fast time is how the Amish refer to our odd practice of changing the time arbitrarily based on the calendar and someone’s bright (no pun intended) idea.
Clearly, “Fast Times at Amish High” has a whole different meaning than at Ridgemont High.
It seems that the cows belonging to the Amish (more…)
Tags: Amish, Arizona, Daylight Saving Time, funny, Hawaii, humor, Seasons, time change
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Fall Back, Spring for Words
Friday, November 6th, 2009
Although the time change from Daylight Saving Time happened a few weeks ago, I still haven’t adjusted. It usually takes me six months to make the shift. By then it’s time to switch back.
While most people are aware that the whole concept that daylight could be saved was invented by that irrepressible inventor, Benjamin Franklin, many are unaware that he conceived of the idea after pulling a candle-lit almost-all-nighter in France.
Tags: Ben Franklin, Clean Humor, Daylight Saving, Daylight Savings Time, funny, history, humor, inventors, laughter, Seasons, time change
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