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Saturday, November 5, 2011

Just for practice, and to make sure I get it right, I've been setting my clocks back an hour every night this week. And I feel goooood. I think we all should have our own time zones, the way all the dusty little towns in the Old West did. Here's the problem: In the olden days, no matter what the clocks said, the farmers knew when to milk the cows. Now that machines run by computers do the milking, the cows are at the mercy of programmers. Isn't that a thing?

Actually, I'm considering leaving it until morning before I set the clocks back. That way, when I oversleep until 11:00 am, the ten o'clock football games will just be starting.

If this was our last day to save daylight, it was a waste, because (at least here in the North Bay) there was no daylight to save. Not only was it dark and gloomy all day, but it rained off and on until midafternoon, when suddenly the skies opened up with a cold winter rainstorm of biblical proportions (except for the frogs, but I have seen it rain frogs here, in the sense that tiny frogs seem to lop up and down like raindrops hitting a puddle).

If you tell me it doesn't rain frogs in the Bible, I will believe you. I base my knowledge of that book on what I remember from childhood, and that wasn't exactly the centerpiece of my secular education. I did go to the sisters on Saturday mornings to fill in the gaps, but they were too busy trying to corral a bunch of seven-year-olds forced to give up their Saturday mornings to teach us much.

For some reason, I have a vague recollection of a frogstorm, but not enough interest to do the research. I suspect it happened in Egypt, where all the really bad things seemed to happen. Or at least, that's where they got the publicity.



Half a lifetime ago I had a boss who was deep into his belief system, and somehow he had it in his head that clocks and calendars were sent down from on high. (Or, as he would have written it, "On High.") In the unquestioning wisdom and infinite certainty of the young know-it-all that I was, I tried convince him that days were 24 hours long and years 365 days because of astrophysics, and that clocks and calendars were the work of scientists and mathematicians. He never came around. Looking back, I now wonder what he thought of daylight saving time and leap year days.




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