Falling Back

I'm a bit chronologically challenged. My internal clock just doesn't tick at a steady beat. Time expands and contracts around me in relation to what I'm doing. For example: I have fifteen minutes to walk out the door. Plenty of time to get my keys, put my shoes on and get out. But then, as I'm stepping out the door, a quick glance at my pocket watch (a.k.a. my phone) confirms that I am, in fact 10 minutes late. What happened? Did I just black out for some indeterminate stretch of time? Did I slip through some sort of mini wormhole that speeds up time in 5 minute increments? I don't know. I can't even blame my kids for this. Granted, the whole getting out the door thing is exponentially complicated when you have 6 shoes to locate and put on, but I do this even by myself. But then earlier this week I went to a preschool Halloween party that was at least 6 hours long, except that the clock said it was only an hour and a half. No way in the world.

Blame this guy.
G.V. Hudson, inventor of modern DST

So it should be no surprise that daylight savings time always weirds me out. How can you just change time like that?! Even more mystifying are the certain states that just simply choose not to do it. (Or, in the case of Indiana, only part of the state does it, but I digress.) Compounding my little circadian rhythm problem, I willfully ignore almost all "news". I don't read news websites, I don't watch news on TV, I rarely read anything in the newspaper except for restaurant reviews. (I have some polka-dotted reasons for all of this, but again, I digress.) So, "Fall Back" is known in our household as "The Weekend We Are An Hour Early For Church" and "Spring Ahead" is known as "The Weekend We Suddenly Realize We Are Going To Be An Hour Late For Church, Should We Just Go For Doughnuts Instead".

But aha! I caught it this year. I don't remember how I caught it, but I did. So today I have what every busy person on the face of this planet wishes for: an extra hour in the day. Wouldn't we all be so much more productive if we just had that extra hour? I would be a better housekeeper, I would finish all the projects I've started, I would write the next great American novel, I would work out, I would give myself a pedicure, iron shirts, get my PhD. We all spend so much time running from this to that and back again. There are 27 fires that must be put out rightnoworelse. It seems the more time we spend organizing and scheduling, the more we have to do. I read countless articles about "penciling in" free time, or down time, or time with your kids, or me time. The very premise of that is a ridiculous notion if you think about it very long, but sadly, in a lot of our lives it's necessary. So we all long for that elusive extra hour. That golden Neverland where things get finished and our hair looks good. Well, today's the day, folks. By some calculus of agrarian time math, we get an extra hour. What will you do with yours?

What am I doing with this extra hour in my day? Well, pretty much what I would do on any typical Saturday night: write a blog post, eat some Cheetos, work on a knitting project, hang out with the Chief Lou, and listen to my monkeys snore. It's a crazy, madcap life I live.