I’ve been going to bed a few minutes earlier every night to prepare for the dreaded Daylight Saving Time (DST).  DST will be upon us like a stale bag of Doritos in less than 2 weeks.  I don’t mean to malign stale Doritos since I’d be a liar if I said I’d never eaten any, but I dislike Daylight Saving Time so much that I had to write down the first freaky and potentially frightening combination of words that popped into my head.  Most people probably don’t like stale Doritos.

Some people mistakenly think this time adjustment racket is perpetrated upon us for the sake of the farmers.  Um…no.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly long and extensively footnoted article about DST; should you like, you can read it here for yourself.  Let me quickly summarize some important facts:

First, let’s clear Ben Franklin of the crime.  Although he did suggest that going to bed early and rising early would make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise, he never proposed changing the time to accomplish these goals.  Nor was it an English outdoorsman and golfer who wanted to make it to the 18^th hole in daylight.  It was actually a New Zealand bug collector who first proposed the idea in 1895.  It was not until 1916 that the scheme was implemented in Germany as a way to conserve fuel during the first World War.  They called it Sommerzeit.

The United States began time manipulation, aka Sommerzeit/DST, when they entered the war in 1918.  Since then, there have been many politically motivated adjustments, sometimes to sell more French fries and sometimes to sell more sporting equipment.   Some day, I’ll tell you just how little money a potato farmer makes when he sells potatoes to a commercial French fry producer.  Let’s just say it’s not the farmer who is getting rich, Daylight Saving Time or not.

In fact, farmers generally dislike changing the time because it upsets the natural rhythms of farm life.

I dislike Sommerzeit too.  It upsets the natural rhythms of my dream life.  I can’t remember a darn thing about them when I wake up in the morning.  Not even the ever-lovely White Flower Farm catalog could induce anything but sleep.   In the last week, I’ve had no dreams, no nightmares, and no chase scenes with bags of Doritos driving Pintos.

Since I have no somnia-vignettes this week, I hope you don’t mind if I share a few waking dreams for this year’s Hampton Victory Garden.  I dream of a carpenter who donates a few hours of time to fix the roof on our garden sign.  I dream of finding an umbrella for our picnic table.  I dream of a “flash mob” of strong young people showing up to work on a one day “fix the fence” project.

Those are my dreams this week.  Oh, and remember:

Sommerzeit is a turkey.

What do you think about Daylight Saving Time?