daylight savings time: thumbs down

Sure, it's nice to have that extra hour of daylight in the evening or whatever, but Ben Franklin obviously didn't have parents of young children in mind when he developed this ridiculous time change. Suddenly, Liam and Max are going to bed when it's light outside. And Liam is well aware that it's light out, and fights the idea of going to bed "early." Yes, I know that eventually, when we hit summer, he'll be going to bed when it's light out anyway, but that's a gradual process. With the stupidey stupid time change, he was going to bed in the dark one night, and then bam! the next night he's going to bed in daylight.

As if that wasn't enough, here in the Hoosier State, we have plenty of other time issues to keep us busy. Check out this link if you want maps and stuff, but suffice it to say that it's more stupidey stupidity. Two years ago, there was a big move to reform the time zones, since some counties were on CST and observed daylight savings, some were on EST and observed daylight savings, and most were in the Eastern Time Zone but did not observe daylight savings. So as part of the big reform, counties got to request which time zone they wanted to be in. Then the state mostly ignored the requests, assigned some counties to CST and some to EST, and decided that everyone would follow daylight savings. Yippee. As a result, my parents, in the next county over, are an hour behind us. My parents and sister both live in CST but work in EST. My little brother and sister live in CST but go to school on EST. Planning any event requires a lot of "Oh, at noon? Is that noon your time or noon my time?" nonsense.

Apparently, there's a referendum in the works to let each county vote on which time zone it will follow, so things could change again. But I think that daylight savings is here to stay. Damn you, Ben Franklin!