Just rambling thoughts about anything that happens to be on my mind and that usually isn't much!
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Sunday, October 30, 2005

Time travel messes up my wristwatch

It’s that time of the year again, when we "fall back." Who came up with the idea of "daylight savings time"? It was a politician of course. Cause you and I both know, it doesn’t save any time, just messes things up for a couple weeks. But a politicians main job is to mess things up and make it sound better than it is!

I have done a little research on "time". First of all you have to understand that "time" was actually an invention of man to begin with. First into seasons, then into lunar cycles and finally into days. There were a lot of problems with the earlier attempts because the cycles are not 100% divisible into those units. After all, it is just over 365 of our 24-hour days to make one revolution around the sun. Thus leap year, except on years divided by 100. But then there is the matter of the every 400 years when we do retain the leap year. Confused yet?

I am sure the Creator of the ages, looks down in amusement at the only creation he made who concerns itself with "time and money". All the other creations eat when hungry, sleep when tired and in general do what is to be done in its season. But man, scurries around trying to fit his schedule into short blocks of "time" …. Of which there usually isn’t enough! But I digress……

I found it interesting to note that Standard Time (ST) wasn’t even "invented" until the late 19th century (1883) with the advancing use of railroads! Before that, everything went on local time, usually set by the position of the sun. And then this standard didn’t become law until the 20th century (1918).

This is all well and good, but then comes along some one who wants to sleep longer in the morning and still have more daylight in the evening. Instead of adjusting his biological clock, he messes up everyone’s by passing a law to change the WHOLE system. Does that make any sense? Daylight Savings Time (DST) was used by Roosevelt in wartime, but was not popular because we were still an agrarian nation (meaning of course, you got up at sun-up and went to bed at sundown). But people moved to town and in 1966, Johnson passed the Uniform Time Act.

Resetting clocks was no big problem back then because they were all mechanical. But a few short years after that the transistor was invented which opened the door to digital EVERYTHING.

Did you happen to save the instructions when you bought your last wristwatch on how to change the time? I didn’t! So I spent the first 3 hours of my "saved time" trying to figure out how to make my wristwatch fall back ONE hour without changing all the other settings for day of the week and date. I was finally able to get it set back an hour with the correct day of week and date but somehow got the "mode" changed. So now I am operating on 24-hour military time. It is now 17:24 o’clock.

I vow next year to have two wristwatches; one set for DST and another set for ST. That way, instead of resetting my clock, I’ll just change watches!

Please, if you happen to know how to reset the mode on one of these things, please send me some instructions!
Dennis

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are doing great. Do you have an editor? Perhaps I would have some useful comments or constructive criticism! You should collect your postings into a published book sometime.

Anonymous said...

You do a terrific job of writing daddy! You should do what the anonymous said and compile it to a book! You have a talent and I believe God is giving you the opportunity to use it!

love you,
me