Around this time of year, I begin counting down the days to Daylight Savings Time. Now, I know the concept of DST is a controversial one for some folks. Me? I unabashedly love it. When you live around the Great Lakes, winter can be pretty dark and dreary. I mean, really dark and dreary: the-get-dark-at-4:45-p.m.-and-stay-dark-until-7:45-a.m. kind of dark and dreary.
Now in summer, the pattern reverses itself. In summer, it gets light about 5:30 a.m. and stays light until about 9:00 p.m. In total, we tend to gain over six hours of daylight – a fairly sizable shift. That shift is so great that it tends to do two things for me: first, winter feels very dark and second, summer feels like I’ve gained extra hours in the day.
So, back to my point: because of this sizable shift in daylight hours, I really crave DST. Instead of it getting dark at 6:15 p.m. on March 9th, on March 10th, it gets dark at 7:15 p.m. Yes, it’s a sleight of hand. Yes, it gets tougher and tougher to get up early and adjust to that time shift each year. Oh, but goodness, does that extra daylight provide a super lift to my spirits.
And that’s why at about this time, I start counting the days. Today? It’s 39 days until daylight savings time. If you want to recalculate that into weeks, it’s 5½ weeks. (And even I’m not that bad to change it into minutes, though the wannabe mathematician in me is now dying to do just that.) We also get cheated this year because it’s a Leap Year, which means an extra day of winter. Normally, it would only be 38 days. I tend to get bitter on Leap Years, honestly.
Now, because winter is inevitable, I have – over the past several years – taken a few steps to make winter more appealing to me. The first is to go hiking or cross country skiing with my sisters on Fridays. Truth be told, we only do this in winter for a few reasons. First, because they live on the lake (Chautauqua, that is) and we are wannabe agriculturalists, spring and summers are very busy for all of us and sneaking away on Fridays gets a little harder. And no one has time in the fall. Plus, we all agree that by keeping our Friday treks to just winter it makes winter special and gives us something to look forward to when it’s getting dark at 5 p.m.
The other things that this little family does to make winter go faster just align with how our lives run. We almost always do a bigger renovation project in winter, which provides a distraction for the dark months. Plus, because we have to complete the project by spring to get ready for planting season, there are times when we actually want winter to move more slowly just so we have little more time to work. We (and by “we”, I really mean “me”) also plan a spring trip to a warm locale. The only real requirement on this spring trip is that we have to pack shorts and t-shirts. Otherwise, I’m not particularly picky about where it is. My husband the workaholic (and bigger responsibility junkie than me), has committed to going at least every other year. In the intervening years, his message is simple: call your sisters. But the spring trip is my bookend to winter. Sometime from late February through early April, I go to where the sun shines and it’s already summer. Then, when I get back, I can handle the few weeks of bad weather until our glorious summer arrives here.
And those are my tricks to not just surviving but starting to thrive in winter. As our winters have become noticeably more and more mild, it does help with the winter blues. We no longer reliably have snow all winter. Instead, we get snow cover and then it melts off. While it does cut into our cross country skiing time, it helps to survive winter because it doesn’t feel like we’re digging a wintery hole that we will have to dig out of before spring. Because I now work from home, it also helps to know that I don’t need to drive in winter conditions all that often anymore. Yes, I still fly (and therefore drive 1½ hours to and from the airport) in winter, but I tightly manage those trips to avoid flying too much in potentially bad weather.
Then, I count the days. 39 of them to be exact. If we wanted to go all the way to spring, that would be 49 days, but that seems too far out to me. I’m good with just watching the clock for DST. And in the meantime, we really do need to get crackin’ on laying those hardwood floors upstairs.
The Yuppie Homesteader 