Thursday, November 20, 2008

Winter is a-coming in

From upper 60s on Saturday, this week has descended into the 20s. People are bundling into down, tying scarves around their necks. pulling woolen caps down to their eyebrows and putting on gloves, some are wearing fashionable but somewhat ridiculous looking furry boots -- ridiculous because those boots are more appropriate to piles of snow and icy streets.

We've had extremely variable weather for the last two months so I'm hoping for more variability and a warming for next week so that Thanksgiving weekend will not be truly cold -- seasonably chilly is okay but I'm far from happy about the shock of rounding a street corner and being slapped hard by a very cold bluster of wind. I think November is the most difficult month for adjustments. After many pleasant days of autumn, suddenly the grayness, the cold are especially unwelcome. A sudden early snowstorm would be an easier adjustment. It would be pretty and the cold would almost be ;ersonalified. Well, I'm not actually wishing for snow, I'm wishing for 50 degree days and let it get cold at night but let's have sun during the day. Not that my wishes have any effect on anything.

Heaven knows with this ridiculous habit we have of changing our clock settings twice a year we are now in a season when darkness begins much too early in the evening. I remember at least 50 years ago listening to my Republican mother cursing Roosevelt for the insanity of day light saving time. We were the farmers those clock swings were supposed to help. She did not think so. I was usually on my father's Democrat side but I did pick up that dislike of time manipulation from her ... heaven knows there is much, much else I know I got from her too and the older I get the more obvious some of it becomes.

When I get home at 4:00 and find it's already getting dark, I tend to think of fixing an early dinner after reading the mail and not doing any quilting because my windows look out in to the darkness of early evening. If it were smmer I would be inspired to sit down and sew in the late light which would last untl after 7:00. Another reason to curse the swinging pendulum of day light swavings... But it does induce reading and I have been enjoying the books I'm digging into.

3 comments :

Stephanie D said...

THe DST throws me off too--and I think it messes up my body. It usually takes a good week before I'm accustomed to the change--and I'm a night shift worker. Go figure.

Of course, J-Man is happier, because I tend to fix supper earlier the nights I'm home. He likes to be in bed around 8, while I'm up til midnight or 1. Trouble is, when we eat by 6, I'm hungry again before midnight.

QuiltingFitzy said...

DST used to make my poor self nuts! It would take me a good 3 or 4 weeks to settle down. Now happily living in a non-DST state..woo-hoo.

We went out to watch the International Space Station pass by at 5:41 last night and it was still very light!

MaryContrary said...

I dread that twice a year upset to my body clock. I takes me at least two weeks to get my body back into sync with the clock. Worse, our three alarm clocks, aka cats, don't have reset buttons. Where they had been content to get us up at 5 or 5:30 for breakfast, for at least three weeks after the fall change it shifts to 4 or 4:30. I have never believed that these changes save any energy or money, which has been the usual rational. I wish they would just leave it alone.