I would really love for the title of this post to be referring not to Sunday, when we all arbitrarily knocked an hour off of our clocks, but to the day when Daylight Savings Time just goes away. Because it's dumb.
If history serves me correctly (and I have no idea if this is true or apocryphal and I'm too lazy to look it up even though I'm on a full-fledged computer with fast Internet and probably could have had the answer before I typed this parenthetical expression, but oh well) Benjamin Franklin was one of--if not THE--first to suggest Daylight Savings Time as a way to save on candle burning. I'm not sure how that ever actually was supposed to have saved candles, but we're talking about an idea from 250 years ago. And modern research has shown that Daylight Savings Time DOESN'T save electricity. In fact, it may even cause us to use MORE electricity.
I don't know about any of that. All I know is that the time shift messes me up twice a year. When I was younger I hardly even noticed it. But yesterday morning I found myself wide awake at 4:30 in the morning, which is an hour earlier than the earliest I ever get up.
I probably don't need to talk about this anymore. If I'm being frank, I just wrote this because I realized I hadn't written in a week, and I wanted to write SOMETHING.
Here's a more interesting thing, I guess. Last Thursday I drove to Frankfort from Northern Kentucky, and I went to Frankfort down U.S. 127, which is a two lane road which used to be a windy, curvy mess, but since it was straightened about 20 years ago is straight enough that you could take your hands off of your steering wheel for long stretches (Kids, DON'T take your hands off of your steering wheel!). Anyway, I was driving down one of the really straight stretches and I looked in my rear view mirror, and approaching me VERY quickly (maybe going 90 miles an hour) was a white pickup truck with its warning flashers on. And that combination threw me. I'd seen vehicles driving at that speed on that road before. They have a death wish, sure, but I've seen it. And I'd seen vehicles with their warning flashers on, usually driving about 15 miles an hour or over on the side of the road for some reason. But to see a vehicle approaching so quickly WITH its warning flashers on didn't make sense to me. It would be like a football player in full pads running at you, shouting and grunting like a football player does, but with a box of chocolates and flowers in his hand. Or a surgeon dressed in full scrubs for the operating room--holding his sanitized hands up to keep them clean--in line behind you at the supermarket. I just didn't know what to make of it.
Should I pull over to the side of the road and let him go by? But he has his flashers on! A lot of drivers with their flashers on get into the emergency lane. What if I pull into the emergency lane just as he decides to do so, too, and at the speed he's going I cause an accident? But was he trying to be like an emergency vehicle, an ambulance or something, and he thought the flashers were like having his siren on?
In the end, I didn't really have to figure it out. I slowed a little and he just whipped into the opposite lane and went around me. He disappeared over the hill in front of us, and by the time I got to the hill he was nowhere to be found.
I hope he got wherever he was going safely....
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