Sunrise/Moonrise

Proof that the days are drawing in. The sunrise was ethereal with a rapidly dissipating line of mist  below the top of Annadel State Park. The moon rising over Wildwood Mountain was also beautiful, despite being a bit blurred by the clouds (and the fact that my camera with the great telephoto lens is still broken).  Since I was able to take both pictures from our front porch, I thought they would make a nice collage....

Apparently there is a proposition on our upcoming ballot which would give the state legislature permission to do away with the twice annual time changes. We will return to Pacific Standard time sometime next week, which means getting up in the dark and having our evening glass of wine next to the fire in the 'library' instead of watching the sunset from  the arbor. 

Further complicating the simple question, 'What time is it?' is the fact that some states have already elected to keep the time the same all year. Do they stay on Standard or Daylight Savings time all year? For reasons I've never had explained, there is a portion of Indiana that is a half hour different.

We were always told that the time changed to Daylight Savings time in the summer because of the farmers...something about the kids getting out of school early enough to help in the fields. It turns out that it was actually instituted during wartime to save fuel. Based on a discussion I heard the other day on the radio, the farmers actually hate Daylight Savings Time because it means an hour less daylight in the morning in which to harvest the crops and get them to market.

Most parents also hate the time change. Little kids and pets can take days to readjust and teenagers need more sleep and have an even harder time getting up in the morning in the dark. People who work have no daylight time at the end of the winter work day to exercise. Then there was the man who was to be executed at midnight on the day the time changed and demanded that he be given an extra hour, and the twins who were born at 11:59pm and 12:01am making the one born at 12:01am older than the one born at 11:59. 

And then there is the question of time zones. They are arbitrarily set so that most of us are getting up and going to bed  with about the same relative amount of light, but since the earth revolves around the sun, those living a distance from the longitude where the time zone changes experience different hours of daylight from those living closer to it.

Apparently all of the Soviet Union was on Moscow time, which meant that if you lived in Siberia the hours of daylight could be eight or ten hours later than in Moscow, and the sun would be rising at 3 or 4pm in Siberia.  

 I have only brief moments of lucidity on these technicalities, but can appreciate that some thorny issues can arise. I don't think there is a way to change the sun, but given the choice between an hour's extra morning or evening sun, I would prefer to have it in the evening.

Maybe we should just go back to looking at the sun or the moon to know what time it is....