As some of you may or may not know, Indiana switched back to Daylight Savings Time for the first time in about 30 years. Now, I grew up doing the DST clock switcheroo, so for me this was not a huge adjustment. For some Indiana natives, however, it was apparently Armageddon come to the mid-west. Some folks were horribly afraid that pushing their clocks forward an hour would completely wreck their sleep cycles. Some were afraid that they would simply forget to reset their clocks, thus plunging them into a quantum vortex and causing them to be out of phase with the rest of the universe. Still others were afraid that they would wake up the next morning with green hair and lucky leprechauns sitting on their chests.
Despite all these fears and worries, Indiana seems to have made the switch rather peacefully (if you don’t count the nasty storms that swept through here). Personally, I don’t see what the big deal was. You actually lose several more hours when you fly overseas than you do when you roll forward or backward one hour. I think it more or less boiled down to a change in tradition – this was the way things had been done for 30 years, so the sudden change proved fearful for some people.
Personally, I would have been content to leave things as they were. I’d grown rather fond of not having to reset my clocks twice a year, but that was a practical issue. I _do_ like the extra hour of daylight, though, since there are plenty of things to be done about the property and with the horses that might not necessarily get done in an evening otherwise. And since most of my friends and family are Eastern Time Zone, it _does_ put me on the same time zone with them year-round rather than for just six months of the year. There are advantages and disadvantages to both observing DST and not. I’m flexible; I can go with it either way. I just hope that the change does what Governor Daniels hopes it will – help improve the state’s economic situation.
