It happened again this year: we changed the clocks back yesterday!
I despise the whole concept of Daylight Saving Time. I’ve railed impotently against it before (see Stop Messing Around With Time!, It’s Happening Again: Daylight Saving Time Returns to Screw Things Up and Right Place, Wrong Time). This time, the transition may be the worst I’ve experienced since I was a radio station programmer, obsessively rising in the wee hours and going to work just to make sure the automated system made the transition as designed. But, that’s another story, from another life . . . .
From this . . . (Galway Bay, Ireland) (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
This year, having just flown to Ireland and back (see Every Sign a Song Cue) I experienced the full, brutal force of adjusting to quickly-traversed time zones. Both Michelle and Aly had done it before, but this was my first experience, beyond flying from Alaska to the U.S. east coast.
I think we did well; I adjusted by refusing to answer peoples’ questions as to what time it was where I’d just come from. That’s just immaterial, I argued. The time here is what matters, and when we lift off on the next leg of the trip, I’ll set my watch to the next time zone, and that time will be what matters (my “auxiliary” solar watch helped this a lot! See Solar “Toys”: “Back Up” Solar Watch). This worked pretty well. For example, about the time we wanted lunch Ireland time, it was dinner time in Chicago, where we laid over.
This mitigated the jet lag somewhat, but not totally. We’ve been dragging a bit since returning, not just because of the shifting times, but because of the cultural changes, returning to our everyday lives after a transcendent experience. Then, Daylight Saving Time ends, and clobbers us while we’re struggling!
. . . to this! In all too short a time (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
We’ve found it hard to get back on our feet. Beside the time differences, Ireland weather was warm and mostly sunny while we were there—much like the weather here in Southeast Alaska had been when we left. Since we returned, we’ve had windy, cold weather, even some snow. Our blood, thinned by clement Ireland, seems slow to “thicken” to our current temperatures. All in all, it’s been too easy to sit inside near the fire, letting chores go undone. We’ve fallen into a bit of anarchy here, and switching off of Daylight Saving Time has not helped one bit.
We expect to pull through. My usual technique is to bull ahead stubbornly. Michelle’s making sure we get the right vitamins and probiotics to avoid falling sick, the most common response to this sort of schedule anarchy. In about three weeks, we’ll have overcome the time change, just in time for our daylight to return to exactly where it was two days ago, before we went off Daylight Saving Time!