Time for changes

New Zealand returned to Daylight Saving Time (NZDT) at 2am Sunday morning (which some people think of as Saturday night…). At the moment, the change just makes sunrise and sunset an hour later than they were on Saturday. However, the days are getting longer as we move toward summer, so the number of hours between the two will continue to increase until late December. All of which is good.

I’m not a big fan of seasonal clock changes, even though this one gave us an hour more of afternoon daylight right now. The reason I don’t like the time change is that as I’ve grown older, it’s taken me longer every year to adjust (presently a week or so, though the one in autumn is much worse…). In practical terms, this means I’m more tired and I’m grumpier than usual. But, as I joked on Facebook, “I know, I know: ‘Would we notice a difference?’”. Quite possibly not—it would depend on the day.

Last week was a particularly busy one, mainly because I needed to mow the lawns, which were overdue due to all the rainy days we’ve had in recent weeks. That same wetness also made the work extremely physically demanding, with the mower constantly nearly stalling on the thick, still pretty wet grass. I did that over two days, Wednesday and Thursday, but on Tuesday, I also gave Leo a bath (photos at the top of this post). He needs a grooming, but in the meantime I’m going to tidy up his fur a bit.

Friday, after three days of physical labour, I decided to go to the supermarket. Thursday evening, I toyed with the idea of ordering groceries for delivery, but hemmed and hawed, and decided I’d shop in person the next day. This was probably not the correct decision.

On Friday morning, I woke up early and my body said, “Look, I don’t care what you did the past few days: Six hours of sleep is FAR too much—get up ya lazy bastard”. I finally did after spending another half hour trying in vain to go back to sleep.

All of Friday, I felt like I’d been up for two days, so pretty much all I did that was the supermarket trip. After I got home, Leo and I had a long nap and we both felt better (well, Leo didn’t actually say that, but I’m pretty sure it makes him happy when I feel better…). I went to bed early that night, and Saturday night, too.

There was one time after I moved into this house where I stayed up specifically to see what my devices did at the moment of the time change. Unfortunately, I picked the September change and it went from 1:59 am to 3:00am, which didn’t look as weird as it might’ve going from 2:59am to 2:00am—but seeing that would mean I’d have had to stay up until 3am in the about-to-depart Daylight Saving Time, and, contrary to popular belief, and my chronotype being “Night Owl”, I’m seldom up that late. At any rate, seeing that September change was about as underwhelming when I was recorded the “leap second” for a brief 2015 video for my YouTube Channel. As it turns out, an international agreement has been reached to end “leap seconds” by 2035. There was no international agreement to stop posting videos to my Channel nearly eight years ago—life happened. Ironically, perhaps, the last video I posted (so far?) was also about time.

Frivolity aside, there’s work I need to do twice year: Change the time in several places. All of my “smart” devices (phone, computers, tablets) automatically change time, but my four wall clocks and non-smart appliances (my oven and microwave) don’t. I can’t be bothered changing the time on the time on my oven or microwave—not the least because I don’t where the manuals are and I don’t know how. For my four wall clocks, I took each clock off the wall to reset the time, and cleaned them at the same time, as I always do (something I wrote about last year).

As I mentioned in my post last year, the clock radio in my bedroom has a button to toggle between DST and ST, but, ironically, the only thing I use that clock for is for its projector function to display the time on the ceiling (Nigel and I stopped using alarms many, many years ago). However, at the last house both Nigel and I forgot how to do that, and we didn’t know where the manual was. Suddenly, Nigel fixed it, and when I asked him how he did it, he grinned and said, “it’s magic!”. That meant that when Nigel died, I didn’t know how to change to/from DST, so I did what Nigel had probably done: I looked it up online. The first time I had to do that, was the end of September 2019—just over two weeks after Nigel died. I’m kind of amazed that I was in any sort of shape to figure that out at that time.

At any rate, all my clocks are now correct, and I also checked the batteries in the smoke detectors, something I do periodically, and always when the clocks change—though I didn’t actually do that until today. This means that all my twice-yearly chores are now done. It’s about time.