Take An Hour, Leave An Hour

This morning driving in to work, I saw the sun. This may not be so unusual for you; you may work a "real" job wherein you get the pleasure of arriving on site post-dawn every day. Or you may be one of those people not on the western edge of a time zone. Lucky dog.

I spend most of my work days days rising, washing, dressing, and driving to work under a dark sky. It's wearing, really, to hear the alarm go off while it's still nighttime outside day in and day out. I really feel for Ainsley, since getting up before dawn has been a way of life for her since she was two and started day care. During the heart of winter, I live for just enough snow to get a one-hour delay; on those morning, I feel in sync with the rest of the world as the sky is dark blue instead of black when the buzzer sounds and by time I put my face on I don't need the overhead light.

This week has been great. For the first time since late September, there has been a light in the sky as I get out the door. Spring is coming, daylight lasts longer, and nowhere do I feel that coming shift in mood more than in the mornings.

And just as quickly as my spirits rise...we have to move our clocks forward an hour this Sunday.

Crap.

I know the logic, that it saves energy and blah blah blah, but can't we please go back to the glory days of Daylight Saving Time coming at the end of March rather than the beginning?

Here in northern Kentucky, where the central time zone line is almost close enough to spit across, the earlier adoption of saving time plunges us back into morning darkness just as those of us in early-riser jobs were begininng to taste the return of dawn into our routines. When it's still possible to get March snow and night-time temperatures can dip into the 30s, the extra hour of light in the evening just doesn't feel like an adequate payoff. From now until Ainsley's last day of school in May, the extra hour of evening light just makes me seem like a bad parent as I send my kid to bed while the sun is still up.

And don't even get me started on losing an hour on Sunday so soon after the February doldrums. My body's batteries, fueled largely by solar power and summer vacation, have not juiced back up from winter's depression. I am not yet ready to pay back that hour we gained in the fall (which came over a long weekend this year; I did not need that hour of sleep nearly as badly then as I do now). I'd be much more up to paying back that loan sometime, perhaps, after spring break.

Enough wining. Do you hate the earlier approach of Daylight Saving Time the last couple of years, or is it barely a blip on your calendar?