An Hour Wasted
Posted at 5:02 AM on March 6, 2009
by Dale Connelly
(41 Comments)
On Sunday, we continue our cyclical dance of the hours with the March shift from Standard to Daylight Savings time. The clock is a human invention and we are allowed to manipulate it however we want, but this is my least favorite part of the deal. I don't mind adding an hour to a beautiful fall weekend, but now we have to take a potentially useful hour and throw it away. Already I feel the loss.
The things I could do with that time! The projects I've been trying to begin. Books I've been meaning to read! In an hour of concentrated effort, maybe I could actually learn something!
Time is money, and we know what's been happening with THAT lately, so maybe it's best to think of this as yet another questionable transaction.
We borrowed an hour for the winter, and now it's time to give one back.
At least they're not asking for interest.
I shouldn't be bitter. I must admit, since last November 2nd, I have wasted an hour or two. More than that, actually. Lots more.
So I will comfort myself through the miracle of rationalization - rather than grieve for the lost potential of an hour that won't happen, I'll tell myself the hour I'm surrendering this weekend is the one I spent trying to untangle those stupid Christmas lights last December - an excruciating 60 minutes puzzling over jumbles of wire dumped across the front lawn in a row of confounding nests.
It was an utter waste of time.
I will surrender that memory to the Daylight Savings Vortex at 2am on Sunday so technically, it never happened. Not only will I feel better, but next December, I'll be able to face that very same Christmas light untangling job without fear or regret, because I will not recall how awful it was.
What about you? Which wasted hour from the past 5 months are you giving up this weekend?
Comments (41)
Good Morning, Dale,
Daylight savings time has always been a puzzle to me. It seems that God made a certain number of hours of daylight and darkness during every 24 hour period. We can manipulate our clocks, as you say, to read anything we want, but the fact remains the sun comes up and goes down as it pleases. In the early 1970s during an energy crisis daylight savings time remained in effect year round with some questionable results. I was teaching in a rurual area at the time and we had young children standing by the road side in the morning darkness, a potential hazard to say the least. The hour isn't added or thrown away, we just spend it sleeping in the fall and getting up earlier in the spring or untangling Christmas lights if you prefer.
Thanks for a great show. It brings a bit of home to me in Prague where my husband and I teach English as a foreign language to business people.
Good Morning,
I don't want to talk about the hour(s) wasted playing solitaire, freecell, spider solitaire on the computer determined to win. I must win before I can stop, you know.
Michele, mentioning the 1970s reminds me of the political cartoon of Nixon holding a blanket that had one end cut off and sewn on to the other end...the "energy saving" of daylight savings in January. Yes, children standing out in the bitter cold at five and six in the morning. Good plan.
And I remember a letter from a dairy farmer to the editor earlier than that complaining about the extra hour of sun burning up the grass in his pasture.
Don't get me started...if the hour I lose this weekend were the only hour, but it takes me a week at least to re-adjust my inner clock.
But I'm not bitter...(smile)
amen, Michele and Cynthia! and i have wasted my share of hours, but this imposed loss has the "outrage factor" - our clocks go forward by dictum rather than by individual choice. so it'll be fun to complain about it today - even if it's a waste of time to complain. :-)
my special irritation is that in summer daylight "saving" time i have to go out in my jammies to put the chickens to bed because they won't go in the hen house until the sun goes down - sometimes very near my early-riser bedtime!!
so are you playing "time" songs today, Dale and Mike? Time in a Bottle? Time is on My Side? a fertile field to plow i would guess....
Morning Heartlanders. I worry about trying to find the hour that you want to give up. It's too easy to slip from choosing a wasted hour (Cynthia, my downfall is spider solitaire) to trying to choose an hour where perhaps you made a bad decision. If you give up that hour, do you change the course of your life, maybe change who you are at your core because of that decision? Slippery slope if you ask me. So I think I'll just keep all my hours and like the rest of us, rail against what seems an artificial change. Surely if the chickens don't agree, then who are we to mess with it?
Cynthia and Sherrilee - yes, I know about the spider solitaire!
My hour I'll gladly forfeit is the hour I spent on the phone with Dell support trying to recover my computer's sound after an automatic Vista update overnite took it away. I couldn't hear the dealing of the solitaire cards. And I couldn't hear any of my music (before RH went on the air). I am letting my frustration with Windows Update go, this Saturday night/Sunday morning. Thanks for the outlet, Dale.
Greetings!
Nothing (short of Monty Python) cheers me up like a good gripe session. This morning at 9:05, I propose we all go outside, clench our fists, and shout at the top of our lungs, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" I have recess duty then, so I'll have to do mine in sign language.
Dale, don't you have a cousin Eddie you can call to help you with your lights this December?
Good Morning Everyone,
Back when I was employed I would spend at least an hour determining which states follow the clock-shifting ritual and which ones take a more libertarian stance. Now that I'm retired - you all have fun with that...
Oh, Donna, what a good 9:05 idea! What has helped me in the past is to throw hay bales around...well, in the past past it helped to throw wet kleenex at the wall...some of it sticks and that is especially satisfying. You have to throw really hard because there isn't much substance to carry it on its own.
Spent an hour in a psychologist's office doing that...cost me money. But very satisfying and I wouldn't take that hour back ever.
Time in a Bottle...good idea, Barb...for a song and a concept.
We have a handful of devices at work which are old enough that they cannot automatically adjust their clocks according to the new time change schedule that was recently and arbitrarily imposed on us. In a twist of irony, I'm going to give up the hour I used to wake up to set the clocks back on those devices in November.
I love Tom Waits and always look for opportunities to reference songs from his large discography. I would love to hear his song "Time" this morning if you have the time for it and if it is in your library!
P.S. (This blog entry made for some fun reading in the comment space!)
Congratulations to all the concert ticket winners! And a special thanks to one winner who has asked me to go with her to the concert Sunday! Am looking forward to it. (Smile)
Good Morning! I too have a hard time stopping at spider solitare until I win (or Snood - until I get a score that is good enough to get on the score board). I LIKE the time change because it gives me more daylight when it is convenient for me - after work. Unfortuately, I am not by nature an earlier riser so the logic that the sunlight amount is the same is not particularily useful - No worms for me! But, as I remind myself, the second mouse gets the cheese.
I love Daylight Savings time! It takes a while to adjust to the change, but so what? I want all the daylight that it is possible to finagle.
On a readers' forum that I visit someone posted a link to a book called "Sun-Dial Mottoes" written by Margaret Scott Gatty (1809-1873). Most of them have inscriptions warnings about the quick passage of time, but one of them has this on it, "Come light! Visit me!" Couldn't agree more.
Here is the link if anyone is curious. The motto listed here is #138, I believe.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gatty/sundials/221.html
Good Morning!
Great thread this morning and I'm not sure which wasted hour I will stick into the vortex hour but it won't be the collective hour I spend on this blog because this is one of the fun times of the day. Perhaps it will be the hour I spent the other day looking for some files my computer ate. I swear this thing should get indigestion from all the the things it eats but perhaps it's part goat. Hmmm, perhaps listening to Radio Goatland through the computer isn't such a good idea...
ps. Good to hear from Michele in the Czech Republic, land of my forefathers!
Happy Friday everyone!
Greetings Heartlanders:
Time is an artificial construct and is an illusion -- but I still do my best to be on time, timely, ahead of schedule, control time, how my kids use/waste time, etc. Being only partially employed at this time, I have more time on my hands for just sitting and thinking (avoiding household chores, organizing, etc.).
Work expands to fill the time, yet I can suddenly become very productive when time is short. Conversely, trying to hurry something usually just wastes time because I screw it up.
Well, my lame philosophical musings have taken enough time ... I'm at a loss for having anything witty or amusing to say. Have a great day everyone!
Wow, I had no idea DST was so controversial. Getting up time in the morning is always dark for me, no matter what the clock says. It's fascinating to watch the struggle between dark and light play out here on the blog.
Donna, are you suggesting I call on the sort of "Cousin Eddie" who would take those lights and dump them in the river, tied to a bucket of concrete? If I had a "Cousin" like that, I might!
Oops! I meant to type "witty or INTERESTING to say." How redundant ... Brain is slow this morning ...
Hearing dave moore sing about his son growing up brings to mind more songs...a new Keeper's CD list? How about Rosalee Sorell or Harry Belafonte's version of Turn Around...about a daughter growing up. Then there is sunrise, sunset from Fiddler again. Oh, and the September song from the Fantasticks...for starters.
Its not fair to say we wasted time,
In my view, we just used it all up
I know its late to suggest a song on the topic but the lyrics above seem perfect. They are from Fireheads by Emiliana Torrini. I bought her CD after hearing her on the Morning Show. So, if there is time . . . .
Where I work, we have "Aloha Friday" instead of casual Friday. There's a Hawaiian song of that name. Aloha RH!
Carla - thank you for that clarification. Time passing only has the meaning I give to it -- fast, slow, meaningful, useless, etc. Perception is everything.
Good morning Heartlanders,
I'm on the East Coast this week and trying to stream RH, but after I click 'Listen' on the popup for the Windows Media Player stream, I get another popup from ondemand2.publicradio.org asking for a userID/password. Anyone have any experience with this?
I guess trying to make the stream work is my wasted hour for today!
morning!
a poem re the fuss over millenium, which discussing the time change has reminded me of:
Chronogram 01.01.00
You talk as if an odometer turn were an epiphany,
As if there were but one way to count,
As if we knew where to start
As if there were more than nothing in a double zero,
As if inky arabesques in a square measured what matters,
As if a watch were more than a noise on the wrist,
As if Albert never spoke,
As if the simultaneous were absolute,
As if we paid no price for our complexity,
As if time had more meaning than we give it,
As if it passed,
As if Dali hadn’t melted it,
As if its length did not depend on the depth of comfort,
Or of snow.
morning (again!)--
either i'm impatient or my first post didn't work.....:-)
apologies if it turns up twice
offering up a little poem re the millenium, and time, and so forth, which today's blog and comments reminded me of...
Chronogram 01.01.00
As if an odometer turn were an epiphany,
As if there were but one way to count,
As if we knew where to start
As if there were more than nothing in a double zero,
As if inky arabesques in a square measured what matters,
As if a watch were more than a noise on the wrist,
As if Albert never spoke,
As if the simultaneous were absolute,
As if we paid no price for our complexity,
As if time had more meaning than we give it,
As if it passed,
As if Dali hadn’t melted it,
As if its length did not depend on the depth of comfort,
Or of snow.
Gonna cancel my request for technical help - I fixed it by hitting 'Cancel' on the request for ID/password popup! Whee! I wish more computer problems were
Thanks for the slice of home... I heart the mornings I can tune in.
Oops - "I wish more computer problems were that easy to fix" was what I meant to say.
Shutting up now.
It occurs to me that many congregations around the world participate in One Great Hour of Sharing on Easter Sunday. The point is to give what you earn in one hour as a special offering for mission (ours goes to disaster relief). Maybe I can think of that hour between standard time and and daylight savings time as the one I'm giving away to help someone hit by an earthquake, a tsunami, or a hurricane.
Hello, and good morning. Just now I got the same popup from ondemand2, and I hit Cancel and the stream started.
My wasted hour was this week as I fought the battle up updating my firewall and security software subscription. The battle has ended but the larger war drags on as I await a reply from the ether to my most recent pleading email.
DST was the worst when I lived in Alaska for many years. By March the lightness is ramping up so rapidly that by the end of the month it stops getting completely dark overnight, the darkness not to return until late August. So why?? What possible sense does it make? But we had DST nonetheless, I guess just to conform to the rest of the US.
MN in Mpls: had the same thing happen to me, but since i am very disobedient, i just canceled it and it continued for me after i hit a few buttons (trouble is i don't know which now). just ignore the password thing. sorry that this is too late to help much......
great discussion today!!
update on the fan in the goat barn: duh. i turned it off at the fan. so then the next day the lights were on but that must not have garnered the response desired so (learning very quickly) the offender stopped turning things on. i think the fan scared the new buck and the offender was having fun with that and lights on didn't scare him so no more switches manipulated. scary how fast they figure things out.
I almost hate to be the one to say it, but the name is "Daylight Saving Time". No "s" on "Saving". But I'm too late this morning. Oh well . . . .
I had the same problem trying to stream the classical station this morning. (I listen to classical at work because it is less distracting than Radio Heartland.)
So far pressing cancel seems to work, but I wonder if this is something coming we will have to deal with.
I have passed the log in question along to our experts. I've not heard of a plan to require registration to listen to our audio streams, but I'll let you know what's up as soon as I hear something.
And thanks, Don, for the correction.
As an optimist, I'm always hoping my saving will pluralize as quickly as possible.
Yea Dale- that'd be the kind of "Cousin Eddie" all right. Feel free to call on "Cousin Donna" in a pinch!
Hearing dave moore sing about his son growing up brings to mind more songs...a new Keeper's CD list? Ooh! Ooh! I have one! My Favorite Spring by Tom Paxton!
I had one of those pop-ups this morning, too. I called our IT guy and tried getting rid of it for the 4th time while talking to him....and it went away like magic! I thought it was just "I.T.-Guy-Vibes" making it go away......(I go back and forth between classical and RH at work. I love both, but Friday has to be RH; it makes me joyful!) P.S. My daughter and I were at that final show, and will always have that terrific memory! And re: DST: My Mom spends the entire DST period announcing what time it REALLY is, and the entire winter letting us know what time it would be if it was DST....Oh well...Have a great day, everyone!
My Grandma (who was born in 1901, and knew the world when there was no such thing as DST) used to say that that hour of sleep she lost in the spring made her tired all summer until she got it back.
I have to admit that I don't particularly like the sun being up so late in the summer. I am a bit of a night owl and I have a hard time getting to bed at a reasonable hour as it is. When the sun is up until 9:45, my body forgets to tell me when to go to bed.
I walk my dogs almost every morning before I go to work. This morning, I chose not to, because the sidewalks were too icy. I used the extra 20 minutes to clean out the cat boxes. I wish I had that 20 minutes back, but still had clean cat boxes. The dogs wish that I would have at least tossed the tennis ball in the yard for them for 20 minutes, so they would like that time back as well.
Darcy
My name is Mary and I'm addicted to Spider Solitaire. Knowing that other Heartlanders share this time-suck makes me feel a little less sloth-like for spending too much time trying to win. Although I do find that I'm able to think and problem-solve while making my moves. It's kind of like ironing or washing dishes in the sink in that regard. Does anyone else wish that real life had an "undo" button, so that when one attempt leads to a dead end, there's a chance to start over and try another tack?
I don't usually blog though I do love to "read" this one and of course, I listen!! Dale, my spouse has a huge fit every single holiday season over UNTANGLING the lights. Yet, he won't let anyone else do it. You always make me laugh. Keep up your great work!
Dale, I was wondering...
Did you mean the lights, or Cousin Eddie, would be tied to the bucket of concrete? I'd better withdraw my offer to help if it was Eddie.
Macworld.com reviewed the MPR iPhone app favorably and mentioned Radio Heartland as "an interesting experiment." They made it sound as if it the mornings had talk, instead of talk and music, but still, it might get RH some additional traffic.
Thanks for noticing the Macworld.com mention, Kris.
I sent Mr. Hatton a note, thanking him for the attention.
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