At the risk of sounding cranky, I can’t wait for Daylight Saving Time to be over. I am looking forward to getting up in the morning with dawn already breaking rather than getting up in the dark. I don’t even mind the fact that the evenings will be darker sooner; it will just remind me to finish up earlier and get to bed at a reasonable time.
This year the clocks will be moving back one hour early Sunday morning, November 6, 2011. Halloween Trick or Treaters in Palos Verdes this year will be starting out while it is still light outside which will be different. It’s hard to make those carved pumpkins look scary in the daylight without the candle’s glow.
How and why did Daylight Saving Time begin? I found an article on the National Geographic site (click here to read) that explained that Benjamin Franklin is credited with this idea. “While serving as U.S. ambassador to France in Paris, Franklin wrote of being awakened at 6 a.m. and realizing, to his surprise, that the sun would rise far earlier than he usually did. Imagine the resources that might be saved if he and others rose before noon and burned less midnight oil, Franklin, tongue half in cheek, wrote to a newspaper.” During World War I, the U.S. Government standardized Daylight Saving Time and made it optional for states to observe it. During World War II, Daylight Saving Time was mandatory year-round! Afterward, it went back to being optional but in 2005, “the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was enacted, mandating a controversial monthlong extension of daylight saving time, starting in 2007.” – thus our late ending of DST this year. If you have traveled to Hawaii or Arizona, you probably have noticed that they are the two states that do not observe Daylight Saving Time.
