Daylight Savings
As you may have noticed, we changed the clocks this past weekend, and so now it is starting to really feel like winter is coming. Personally, I like this clock change, at least in the mornings, because for most of the year I am a morning person, except when it starts to be SO. DARK. EVERY. MORNING. like it has been for the past couple of weeks.
As you may have heard, though, Massachusetts is considering ditching daylight savings time and joining the Atlantic Time Zone, officially, which means that the clocks wouldn’t change in November and then change back in the spring, but that we would stay essentially one hour ahead of Eastern time from November through February.
Why would they be even considering such a move, you might ask? Well, the fact that the sun sets effectively one hour earlier after the time change means that farmers lose out on one hour of daylight (I’m not sure this is true, as a hard scientist, I am pretty sure they could just get up an hour earlier and get the same total daylight time). Those farmers include people who are currently farming the cranberries from our bogs all over the state of Massachusetts, and the peak harvesting for those cranberries is right now, in the late fall. Longer daylight in the afternoons means more harvesting time (although it does mean more dark in the mornings).
What does this mean for you, readers? Nothing, yet. The commission that was studying this decided that Massachusetts should probably switch to Atlantic time, but only if it can convince other states to do it too! Otherwise, people like me who work in Rhode Island but live in Massachusetts would have to travel between two different time zones every day! How confusing!
Happy November-ing, readers, and enjoy those cranberries!
