The Riverlands

This is just a note to mention that I, Mikaela Bell, stayed out and partied until 4:00 am on the night of Wednesday, October 31, 2007.  Yeah.  First one of the other students had a party for her birthday/Halloween at her apartment, which started at 9:00 pm.  About 1:00 am we all headed out to a disco, and then after an hour, hour and a half some of us went to a bar where it was a little easier to talk.  We then passed most of the next two hours arguing about whether there’s any point to having a queen of England.  Yeah.  (”But she represents the chivalric ideal!”  “She represents an exploitative hereditary class system.”  You get the idea.)  About four the bar closed and kicked us all out into the street, at which time I went home, got a shower, surprised my parents by calling them at 9:00 pm their time, then slept until I was awoken at noon by the cathedral bells (our dorm is literally right next door to the cathedral) going haywire for All Saints’ Day.  (Which is an official holiday here, so we didn’t have school.  Don’t worry, I’m not that irresponsible.  And I made up for it by spending most of my day off studying.  All right, and finishing S1 of Heroes.  You have all really got to see that show.) Anyways, it was really fun.

Oh, and then I had this funny little story that took place last week…I think it was Wednesday?  I don’t remember.  Anyways, I woke up and discovered that my computer clock was an hour off from my phone and mechanical watch.  Weird, I thought.  But, I figured, computers can get bugs and I have two clocks, one of them mechanical, versus one, so I set the computer time by my watch and went about my day.

Well, all I can say is thank God I didn’t have class early in the morning or anything.  I had no idea anything was wrong until I went down to lunch and discovered…that the cafeteria was closed and silent.  I was walking back up to my room feeling rather disgruntled that I never seemed to be able to figure out what time the food is served from day to day, and wondering if I’d missed lunch or if it hadn’t started yet, and what I was going to do because I had to leave for class in half an hour, when suddenly it hit me that maybe my computer had been right and my other clocks had been wrong.  But how could that be? I thought.  It’s too much of a coincidence that both my phone and my mechanical watch could go wrong at once!

Then, like a glimmer of light, a faint, vaguely-heard-of idea leaked into a corner of my brain.  Daylight…savings…time? I thought.

Do they have daylight savings time in Europe?  Isn’t that an American invention, Benjamin Franklin or something?  And…so, how does it work again?  I know it changes in the fall sometime…and it’s fall…so it could be…

So I went back to my room and went online to find the official time at that precise moment in Spain.  I do a search and sure enough, it says 2:00 instead of 3:00.  And then to confirm it, the cathedral bells rang 2:00 as well.  So basically I’d gotten up a whole hour earlier than I had to (boy was I ever mad about that!) and even though I was starving lunch wouldn’t be served for another half hour.  Man, life is tough sometimes.

I asked around a bit later and sure enough, they have daylight savings time here.  Everyone was a little amused…all right, one or two people were very amused…that I had no idea how it worked or when it happened and that I’d spent the morning functioning under the delusion that my computer had a bug in it.

I just don’t get it, see.  All right, I get that the days are shorter in the winter.  But why go to all the trouble of changing the time back an hour just because you have a lot to get done?  Why not simply get up an hour earlier to milk the cows, and leave the rest of us who aren’t farmers to go about our lives in peace without screwing up our schedule?  I love living in Arizona.  Ranchers forever.