Showing posts with label DST. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DST. Show all posts

Monday, March 10, 2025

Changing The Clocks And Watches

As I said yesterday way more briefly than I intended to (I meant to go back and add a lot more Saturday evening) I love Daylight Saving Time.  It was nice yesterday to still have it being daylight a 7 PM.  The Mews can't tell anything happened; they like on suntime, not clocktime.

But the first day is always annoying with all the clock adjustments.  I'm kind of clock-obsessed.  I wear a wristwatch.  Every room has at least one wall clock.  The kitchen has 2 wall clocks, an oven clock, a M/W clock, and the basement has 2 wall clocks.  And the car has a clock.  In fact, I discovered that even my thermostat has a clock!

Fortunately, a few years ago, I bought a bunch of radio-signal controlled wall clocks.  Those automatically adjust daily as well as for DST.  A couple others have buttons to change for DST/EST.  The clocks on the oven, M/W, and car are easy enough to change (just press an "hour" button).

The hard part is the wristwatch.  It does too many things to make the DST change easy.  Time of course, but alarms, hourly chimes, stopwatch (upcount), timer (downcount), time-zone change adjustment, and something called "split-time", etc!

And it has 4 buttons to control various features in different sequences.  Utterly maddening.  And the pamphlet print is tiny, so I have to wear my headband magnifier to read it.  

I actually had less trouble this year.  I'm good with instructions, but these instructions are foreign-written, so of course some of the sentences aren't very well-written.  There is no automatic DST sequence, so I have to change the time as a "correction".  

It took several tries to manage that (even though it seemed to me I ta the exact same thing the first couple of times.  But I got it moved 1 hour ahead.  ðŸ˜€

And with that success, I decided to try a few other corrections.  It beeps at me for a full minute at midnight as some kind of alarm setting.  I think the watch came with that setting.  I learned a few weeks ago that pressing the D button shuts it off for that day, but it does it again the next.  So, I tried the instructions for shutting the feature off entirely.  I'll find out if that worked later tonight.

But now it goes "beep-beep" on each hour.  Not horribly annoying, but I would like to shut that off too.  I'll have to pull out the instruction pamphlet again later today.

When my previous replacement watch died after about 10 years, I tried to replace it with another that was equally simple.  No matter how cheap a watch I looked at, they all come filled with features and buttons I din't want to deal with.  I only want 2 things from a watch.  First that it keep accurate time.  Second that I can read it in sunlight.  OK, one additional simple DST/non-DST button would be nice too.

I bought my current watch because it didn't mention all those timer/alarm features, but it had them anyway.  ðŸ˜–

I sure miss the digital Phasar wristwatch my Dad bought me when I was about 16.  It kept perfect time, only told me the time/day/date, and had a great clear display.  It lasted 40 years!  OK, it needed a new battery every 3 or 4 years and a jeweler had to replace a chip twice.  But sadly there came a day when he couldn't find the chip anymore.  ðŸ˜¢

So I've been suffering with these stupid over-complicated watches ever since!

Well, at least it will be 8 months before I have to go through this AGAIN...


Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Pansies

I love pansies.  They flower in Winter and Spring.  Few plants do.

The local DIY store had a great deal on them.  18 pansies in cell-packs for $16.  Can't beat less than a $1 per plant...  I bought 6 flats of them 3 weeks ago.  Then it turned nasty outside.  When it wasn't raining, it was cold.  Or windy.  And then we went to DST, so it was dark an hour earlier.   I couldn't find a good day to plant them...

But then there was a day good outside, sort of.  Up to 54F and not much wind.  But then I realized I really needed to sort the colors out.

My sunken patio is a good height for that, so I spent an hour doing that.  But then I realized that to plant them "randomly", I needed to have all the colors mixed in the trays where I could easily reach the different ones.  Nothing is simple, LOL!

By then it was getting dark.  DST is a real change here.  Exactly when the DST change happens, the sun path is blow the elevated house west of mine.  I get TWO hours loss of sunlight.  It gets dark at 3:30 pm and cloudy days make it worse.  When I get up and about at 10 am and eat breakfast and read the newspaper by Noon, that doesn't leave much of a day.

But I got them planted.  Descriptions and pictures tomorrow...






Dental Issues

 Visited the dentist 2 days ago for 6 month tooth-cleaning.  Got bad news.  I am healthy in general.  But my family has a history of bad tee...