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jimsjournal |
Saving daylight -- 03/14/10 |
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Changed the time on my bedside alarm clock and the alarm clock in our bathroom (which serves as a backup to the bedside clock -- it's rarely needed but provides peace of mind) and finished reading The Fallen, Mark Terry's latest thriller before turning out my light. I'd been reading it in bits and pieces for the past few days, but that's very frustrating, like trying to watch 24 in ten minute snips. Page-turner thrillers are supposed to consumed in continuous page-turning sessions, not in little nibbles. So, it was very enjoyable to follow the action-packed adventures of counter-terrorist super agent Derek Stillwater through to his triumphant success without paying attention to the lateness of the hour. The pain came in getting up about quarter to seven after having been reading until almost three. Four hours sleep is not enough. About quarter to nine, Nancy said she was going to go back to bed for a nap. I agreed that sounded like a good idea but I had promised both Jill and Jeremy that I would wake them up at ten. So I stayed downstairs reading the Sunday paper until my watch said it was ten o'clock, then I poured two mugs of coffee and went upstairs to wake them. I woke Jeremy first, handing him his coffee and commenting "You wanted to be up at ten..." He laughed and pointed at his clock -- it read 11:02. Oops. I had reset my alarm clocks, but had not reset my wristwatch. Duh! That's when I was able to convince myself that I really did need a nap. We had really heavy rain yesterday accompanied by very strong winds. I mean really strong winds, sustained gusts in the 40 to 50 mile per hour range... the kind of gusts that sound like a freight train passing nearby. How windy was it? Well, take a look at this on our deck... those are shingles that had been ripped off the roof by those overnight winds.
We had been thinking about having the roof done this summer. I guess this confirms that we will need to have it done. Now all the clocks in the house agree on the right time, as does my watch. The dashboard clock in my car also now has the right time -- not because I reset it but because I had never changed it away from daylight savings time. The other day I registered to attend an online presentation being done by a colleague in England. The presentation was being from 18:30 to 20:00 -- U.K. time. Now normally I would just subtract five hours to convert English time to my time... however, in this case I knew we were changing to daylight savings time this weekend but when was England changing? So, a bit of googling and I found out they aren't changing until the last weekend in March, so for a couple of weeks I am only going to be four hours off from U.K. time. Thus, that presentation will be from 4:30 until 6:00 for me. Oh well, I will appreciate this time change nonsense when I have all that extra daylight to enjoy in the late afternoon but right now it's so wet and cloudy that I don't think that I will go outside to enjoy it... and the weather forecast says 100% probability of rain tomorrow (and cloudy with 30% chance of rain on Tuesday). Ah... but Wednesday through Saturday -- four days in a row with clear skies, full sunshine, and mild temperatures. In fact, it might even hit 61 degrees (around 16 Celsius) on Friday. Wow! Spring!
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