DST—Love, Hate, & Confusion

There is something about Daylight Savings Time (DST) that turns me off. As I understand it, the time change we experienced at 2:00 a.m. this morning is supposed to:

1. Provide us with an extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day

2. Save energy (electricity) by our not having to turn on our lamps as early as we normally would have.

Well, that extra hour of daylight doesn’t help me today; it has been raining with thunder and lightening for more than an hour. Alex and I went for a walk prior to the start of the rain; however, as soon as the first drops fell, I saw a white body followed by a black tail streak toward our front porch. For a while, Alex did his I hate the rain-thing and sat in the doorway watching the water he despises fall from the sky. He finally gave up, stuck his claws into my leg to inform me he wanted dinner, and is now well fed and curled up taking his afternoon catnap. It is still light outside—and it is still raining.

Back to Daylight Savings Time. Perhaps one of the reasons I have problems with it is that, for eleven years, I lived in a southern Indiana county that never observed it, The county remained on Eastern Standard time all twelve month of the year. That caused me some problems. If I had a meeting to attend in, for example, Louisville, I had to determine what time it was. During Daylight Savings time, Louisville was an hour earlier than my county. However, the rest of the year, Louisville and my home were on the same time. It got even more confusing if I went to another Indiana county; back in those days 77 of the state's 92 counties were in the Eastern Time Zone but did not change to daylight time in April. Instead they remained on standard time all year. That is, except for two counties near Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, which did use Daylight Savings Time. But the counties in the northwest corner of the state (near Chicago) and the southwestern tip (near Evansville), which are in the Central Time Zone,

Confusing? You bet!

Well, that’s all changed—although it really makes no difference to me since I’ve lived in Louisville for almost ten years. In April 2005, the Indiana legislature passed a law agreeing to observe daylight saving time throughout the state. I wonder how my friends in Perry County, Indiana,--where they never observed Daylight Savings Time, have liked that.

The interesting thing is, just a few months after Indiana got in step with the rest of the United States, the federal government announced a major change in Daylight Saving Time. In Aug. 2005, Congress passed an energy bill that included extending Daylight Saving Time by about a month. Beginning in 2007, Daylight Savings Time will begin the second Sunday of March and end on the first Sunday of November. That will give all of us another couple of weeks of DST to love—or to hate.