Ready to recapture that hour most of us lost last Spring? Daylight Savings Time ends at 0200 Sunday — two hours past Saturday midnight. The fiddling of our time twice a year sparks a lot of debate and the Senate passed a measure to make DST permanent while the House is not so sure.
The measure, passed in March, would make the ‘” springing back” an hour in Spring, permanent, starting in November of next year. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who sponsored the bill, claims it gets rid of the confusion.
Last time we checked, neither Biden nor House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had said whether or not they support making DST permanent.
“I know this is not the most important issue confronting America, but it’s one of those issues where there’s a lot of agreement,” Rubio said back in March. “If we can get this passed, we don’t have to do this stupidity anymore. Pardon the pun, but this is an idea whose time has come.”
DST, when in effect, has kids going to school in the dark each morning. Returning to normal Eastern Standard Times makes it dark earlier.
My paternal grandmother once said that Daylight Saving Time is “trying to make a blanket longer by cutting off a foot at one end and sewing on the other.” I grew up on a cattle farm near Willis and the cows didn’t recognize a change in time. It just meant whey expected to be fed at 0600 each morning instead of 0500.
In a career that included government service and most years as a photojournalist, I worked a watch that measured GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) or UTC (Universal Times Code) and that time never changed but I had to adjust the “local time” on my split-timezone watch twice a year.
After many years of wearing an automatic movement “GMT Master,” the State Department issued a warning that such watches were targets for armed robbers in places like Manilla in the Philippines and the Far East and I switched to a solar-powered Citizens that reset its time at 0200 each day. It never let me down and I still have it, along with Citizen World Chronograph which also does not require a batter or hand-winding and is always up to the second. At 0200 Sunday, both will switch the local time from DST to EST but we will have to reset our Grandfather Clock and a handful of watches that lack the capability to connect with the National Institute of Standards atomic time clock in Colorado.
While the Senate has voted to make DST permanent a year from now, the House has not taken up the bill.
“We haven’t been able to find consensus in the House on this yet. There are a broad variety of opinions about whether to keep the status quo, to move to a permanent time and if so, what time that should be,” Pallone, a Democrat, told Reuters news service, He added opinions break down by region, not by party.
What? Something in Congress where hyper-partisanship doesn’t rule? Imagine that.
Unless you are lucky enough to have watches that automatically connect to NIST, remember to set rest your watch and clocks back an hour before going to be tonight.
If you don’t, you will have a built-in excuse to miss church on Sunday.