DO I HAVE TO?

If you’ve read this blog before, you know how I rail against the standard/daylight savings time change. You must be saying “’nuff already,” and “there she goes again,” and “there are much worse things, so grow up.”

Only this time I am not pleading for me. Take pity on my cats.

You see, they don’t read digital clocks, (though one of them, I swear, can read the analogue kind. She will stare at it for hours until it’s feeding time) so just pointing at the clock and saying “not yet” has no effect.

Try telling Ms. Nougat that I have one more hour to sleep. She’ll pretend to be polite for a few minutes, and then graduate to jumping and attacking the quilt and finally-- me.

Try telling Miss Clara her seven/thirteen/seventeen/twenty O’clock (think army times) feedings are not yet/not yet/not yet/not yet, and see how far that gets you.

I know, change is good. Change is a mini-vacation. In fact, why would anyone who lives in a nice place and a beautiful location schlep to a vacation? For the change, of course.
As hard as I try to convince myself these forced time changes are vacations, I can’t convince my cats.

©The New Yorker cartoons IB PG

And then, when I finally succeed, we have to do it all over again in spring.

Take pity. If not on me, then on the cats.

Ms. Nougat: “Sorry, the old seven just doesn’t feel like itself. Glad you’re up even if you prefer to still be tucked in. See how nice it is to be up an hour early? I’m on top of it, literally.”

THE TIMES THEY ARE A’ CHANGIN

Having *just* gone onto Daylight Savings Time, (after our country's ever decreasing sojourns on standard time) those who’ve read my posts of yore know that makes me cranky.

In November 2018 the citizens of the great state of California voted to stay on Daylight Savings Time permanently. The state that champions change doesn’t enjoy it as much as you’d think. I know I don’t.

Proposition 7 passed by sixty percent of the voters. But no matter, because the Federal Uniform Time Act prevents this from happening. Yup. We can stay on standard time year round, but not on Daylight Savings. So while I personally do not care which one we stay on, (staying is the operative word for me) seems we can’t stay on DST.

Kvetch, kvetch. There are worse things than twice a year adjustments. Get over it.

But then, how would I get to experience the ground shifting discomfort that my fictional characters endure? And what would I have to complain about on a beautiful California morning?

In the words of my grandmother, (and maybe yours) “You have to have clouds. Because if every day was sunshine, how would you know how good it is?”

Adjusting over here.

Daylight Savings/Standard Time & Website Statistics

It happened again. The time was changed on us. Today, Sunday, we were shoved back onto Standard Time. This reminded me of a post from five years ago. Let me explain.

When you have a website, you can get statistics on how many page loads there were on any given day. You can even see the general geographic places these “clicks” are coming from. It’s a free service, and if you want to pay more, (I don’t) there are sophisticated versions of it.

On Blogger this is automatically part of the site and easy to see if you click on the word Stats on your blogger panel on the left. You can set it up never to count your own clicks to your blog (I did) and get a more accurate idea.

This blog’s posts usual click numbers are modest by any standard. They range in a low couple of hundreds, with occasional posts not even reaching three digits. Some of the hits are real readers (like you) and some are random search engines that look for keywords.

I’m delighted that anyone visits. Bless you.

But there was one outlier early on among my posts. It was this one, on Daylight Savings Time. It’s not a great post, nor very informative. But it had a few thousand hits, well above the usual for my site. Looking at the origins of the hits, Blogger’s Stats said that many were from Russia.

At the time, this did not mean much to me. I assumed Russian search engines were combing the Internet for certain key words. So what? Surely, they are not interested in Daylight Savings Time, and most definitely not in my kvetchy rant about it.

The whole subject of Russian hacking has taken a completely new meaning now. My time-disturbed brain is wondering... Hey, Russians, will it happen again? C’mon down and look. For your convenience, I’ll even use Google Translate: Летнее время*

*Daylight Savings time in Russian, I hope.

I doubt it, because these Internet-combing algorithms must have long concluded this blog is useless for their purposes. But if I knew for sure, I would tell you.

And yes, I’m in the throws of adjusting to the time change, Kvetch-kvetch.