Time change snafus and such

I woke up this morning and as I normally so, wonder what the time is. Now earlier, Elise's alarm had gone off (presumably at 5:30 a.m.) because she works today. My alarm had gone off at 6:30 a.m. (again, presumably), because I like to be up and about by 7 a.m.

So when I started to reach for the clock, I suddenly realized that the time had changed from Daylight Savings to Standard Time during the night. I looked at my clock (which gets its time from the atomic clock radio signal) and it was off by 2 hours. Elise's clock still read the old DST time.

I finally gathered that it was actually about 6:30 a.m. I wondered if Elise had figured out the change. Since she was no longer in the house, I assumed she had gone off to work an hour early. Just a little while ago, she called and part of the conversation was that indeed, she had gone in early... as did the other day shift nurse. So the night shift nurses got to go off work early this morning.

I've never been a fan of DST. I've always thought it was a dumb idea and couldn't figure out why it was supposed to "save energy." I got part of an answer in Friday's WSJ column. The whole exercise is based on stale data and assumptions that have likely changed since the research was last done over 3 decades ago.

This year was particularly annoying because of the extra 4 weeks of DST -- 3 weeks in the spring, and 1 week in the fall. Quite a bit of time-based electronics (such as VCRs) are hard-wired in their DST changes and the VCR at our church missed recording a program because it changed the time back one week early this year. I have a sneaky suspicion this wasn't the only unit that experienced this particular snafu.

We are having a bit of dry-ish days here. The constant, heavy rains over two weeks resulted in quite a bit of water to seep up into parts of our basement. That is now finally receding with the help of the dehumidifier that runs 24/7.

All of us are suffering, to varying degrees, the cold that was gifted to us a week ago. It feels like I'm over the worst of it, which was nowhere near what our girls experienced. They had some nasty coughts, but I haven't had that and hopefully will not.