Blog? or Blargh? You decide…
For most of our lives, time flows in a seamless fashion (perceptually, at least – I’m not going to get into the physics of how time works – mostly because I don’t understand how it works. I just know that time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like bananas.). But every once in a while – once a year for most US residents, and any time you travel far enough east from your starting point – it jumps forward, and an hour simply vanishes. I’m referring, of course, to Standard Time versus Daylight Savings Time, and the international time zones we all have to put up with in order to make the world work.
The time zone jump bit me in the keister today.
The day started (too) early – I had set my alarm for 6:30, but woke at 4 for a bio-break and never went back to sleep. At 6:35 I got up, showered, packed, and loaded the truck before having my breakfast. Eve and Rick rose about 7:45 to say goodbye to me and to help me play musical cars. With the various dilly-dallies that happen every time I leave somewhere, I didn’t actually get going until 8:10 or so, and we kidded about it, saying that now the whole rest of my vacation (3 more weeks) was going to be off schedule.
Never make jokes about time.
At about 11 AM, I was tooling east on US 30, a little bit east of Valparaiso, IN, when Ed (he and his wife, Linda, were my lunch stop today) called me to see how I was doing. I told him I thought I was right on schedule and then he told me that Indiana is on *Eastern* time and that it wasn’t 11 AM; it was noon. Oops. I had told him that I’d be at their house around 12:30 for lunch, and I was still 90 minutes away.
Well, we adjusted that part of the schedule and had a good, but way too short, visit for lunch, and then I pushed off for Stop Two of the day: dropping a piece of my Jeep project off at a custom gear shop in Bellevue, OH, to get a custom gearbox built. I had told *them* I’d be there before 5 PM. It was a 2 1/2 hour drive from Ed and Linda’s to the gear shop, I didn’t leave Ed’s until 3, and I was supposed to be at the shop by 5.
For various reasons, it didn’t happen. [One of the reasons was a pickup truck that insisted on doing 40 mph in a 55-mph zone. An eighteen-wheeler was behind it, and I was behind the big rig. There was no way I was going to pass both of them on a busy two-lane road.] I got to the gear shop at 5:30, which would have been 4:30 if the time jump hadn’t bit me, which would have been plenty of time to get the necessary paperwork done (i.e., for me to pay them so they’d start working on the box). *sigh*
So now I have to decide (by Monday morning) whether to skip my visit to the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY so I can drive back to Bellevue from Cincinnati and deliver the part I have, and then go to Lexington for my visit with friends there, or skip the Bellevue part, go to the Corvette Museum, and drag the Jeep part all the way back to Tucson so I can ship it from there. [Light bulb: There *is* another alternative I just thought of: I have the shipping container with me – the Jeep part is in it – so I suppose I *could* ship it to Bellevue from wherever I happen to be and still get to the Corvette Museum! Hmmm… <think think think> This requires some cogitation.]
Stay tuned for the next episode.
Postscript: I arrived at my motel in Farmington Hills, MI, at a reasonable hour – I think it was a reasonable hour; I can’t tell any more – and connected with the folks I’m having breakfast with tomorrow. So at least *that* got successfully resolved!
The Peripatetic Traveler 
Note to self: It’s “Daylight Saving Time” – no ‘s’ on “Saving.” double-blargh.
I hate time zones.
I’m not fond of them – especially not today – but they’re a necessary artifact of our civilization. I’d hate to think how effed-up we’d be without them, and having every city, town, hamlet and village with its own time.
But we could at least do away with DST. Put us on DST and leave us there permanently. I think everyone agrees that DST makes things worse.
That would make too much sense.
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