I have to agree with what the wise old Indian had to say about Daylight Saving Time, “Only a white man would cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it on the bottom and think that would make a longer blanket.”

Daylight Saving Time has never made sense to me. Isn’t time based on something bigger than us, like when the sun is directly overhead at noon at the Greenwich meridian? It seems like human whimsy that we can decide that what is noon should now become 1:00 as of the second Saturday in March.

And although DST only shifts time an hour, it seems like a slippery slope. Why don’t we move the equinoxes – they are also based on the movement of the sun – to make the summers longer and the winters shorter.

I’m thinking I’ll institute BST – that stands for Birthday Saving Time. On my next birthday, I’m going to move the year I was born forward by one number just like we do with the clocks. And voila, I’m a year younger. 

I understand there were legitimate reasons why DST was initially adopted, and then re-adopted. It was done to conserve coal and other resources in WWI. However, it had been so unpopular that following the war it was repealed until WWII when it was put into effect year-round until the end of the war in 1945.

Until 1966 when the Uniform Time Act was put in place, some states observed DST and some didn’t. Which is pretty much just like it is today; Hawaii and most of Arizona don’t have DST.

I have often wondered how people in Arizona deal with being the mainland holdout to DST. Do the signals that reset our cell phones know to skip over that state – except for the Navajo Indian Reservation which does observe DST. (I guess they didn’t hear the joke.) Or when the bars close in Arizona, do patrons high-tail it across the state line into Nevada to find a saloon that’s still open?

I guess I just don’t like someone else deciding messing around with something as precious as time. After all, it’s the one thing in life that we are always in need of more of.

And right now, I’d really like to get back that hour of sleep that we lost last night.