Here we find ourselves again, it is time to "Spring forward":, and regain that hour of sleep we lost last fall when we did the "Fall back" part. When I was a kid, a kid in grade school , these abrupt changes in the hours of daylight seemed magical to me and I was convinced that they had something to do with the changing of the seasons. And sorta, kinda ,may-be some thing to do with the school year. It was all a part of the great wide world that was out there beyond the pink sandstone walls of my school building, I would someday join, and learn the secrets of, I was sure.
Before I drift off tonight, I will turn the few clocks in my house ahead, and relish the idea and the fact that I will get an extra hours sleep and it will be light outside for and hour longer than it was today. Even though it doesn't really change the number of hours of day light, my brain feels the need to recalibrate itself thinking it does.
I have heard that it takes about a week for our bodies to adjust. And that the Monday afterward is particularly bad, and dangerous, for that reason, To me the worst is being hungry at the wrong times, that takes a couple days to go away.
This cat clock reminds me of the long , lazy and often dull Sunday afternoons of winter. Often these afternoons were spent at my Aunt and Uncles house, there was very little to do there except eat, and play a few games, we sat at the kitchen table and watched a clock like this one tick away the minutes, and hours while the adults, who were seated around the dinning table in the next room talked about whatever it was adults talked about in those days.
Ben Franklin reportedly proposed an idea similar to Daylight Savings Time to the Parisians, who slept until noon and then stayed up until midnight or later, thus using what he felt were excessive quantities of candles.
In the early 1900s, the idea was revived, and by WWI was in practice, there have been several revisions, and most recently , 2007 I think, the date on which the time changed was moved back 3 weeks in the Spring and forward one week in the Fall. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to calculate the amount of energy this has save over the years?
