Pro or anti Daylight Savings Time?

Daylight savings sneaked up on me this last weekend here in Spain. Fortunately I had slept late, a prereq for a nice weekend morning, and my Sunday am appointment was not missed either. I noticed that despite having an extra hour, I was still running late in the end. Seems like you go into leisure mode when you think you have an extra hour!

Another shock came today when I went to the store after work and came out of the store to pitch black skies of night. How does that surprise you every single year?

The pro in this case was waking up to light. I really, really don't like to get up in the dark, so I do not mind at all the next few weeks that will give me a day lit morning.

I will miss the longer evenings though. For some reason, even though the temperature didn't change, going for a long walk in the dark doesn't have the same appeal as a sunset stroll. In the heat of summer, however, we had to wait until 10 pm for the streets to cool down enough for a walk. Us and the rest of our Spanish village! Now we are all scurrying to the park at 5 or 6 pm. Our internal meters all seek the same bit of light. Or it could be I'm getting to be more Spanish in my life style? They seem to do things in groups, rarely are people doing things solitaire.

 With Europe changing a week before the USA, I get messed up in my internal calculation of what time it is for my people back home. Then there's my grandpa in Arizona which doesn't participate in daylight savings so while his time doesn't change, I have to try to remember is this the season where he's 8 or 9 hours different from me?

I know a few people who are adamantly anti-time changing antics on the clock. Just leave it alone, they say. They don't care about long days in the summer.

I also have heard the other argument that they should just leave it switched so that the longer light is in the evenings, don't switch back and forth.

Extra light? No change? Which one are you?

Perceptions of Time part 2

This is part two of a blog I did earlier about my perception of time and how I struggle with feeling like I'm wasting it or that things/tasks will "take too long." Even now, I am at my day job office without my computer so I'm redeeming the time by blogging on my ipad.

So I surprised myself yesterday. I put on music and did some chores. I did dishes, swept floor in kitchen and hall. It was only 3 songs. So figure an average song is around 3 minutes. In 9 minutes, I did much more than I would have thought would occur in that amount of time.

On the other hand, I tried to quickly go through my email. It took me 5.5 songs to deal with email, not actually do it but disband it to the "to do" "to read" and then a few things I could dispatch instantly. More time than dishes and sweeping and feels maybe like less done.

I did a seminar on writing once and I did an exercise with the class. Something I stole from a class I had been in previously. You take a theme and write on it for 3 minutes and then count the words. You'd be amazed how much of a rough draft you can do and how many words appear on paper. It's so much about just sticking to it or squeeking out some time here and there.

I've been having trouble getting back into a couple writing projects because I feel I'll be interrupted or it's not enough time. It's true that when you've been away from a project for a while it takes a bit longer to find your grove again, but maybe I need to use the small bits of time despite the fact they feel insufficient. I need to write anyway whatever the time frame, but that doesn't come easily to me.

Perceptions of time part 1

I have recognized that I and many of my fellow Norte Americanos are obsessed with the idea of wasting time. Particularly in the US, I think we think about this. Me personally, I have started noticing how many things I view as potentially wasting my time. One that feels huge to me is when you have to load software or some random extra computer things. This feels like a huge interruption to what I'm trying to get done. Sometimes what I'm trying to "get done" isn't particularly important, but ask me to upload something on the way to viewing your kid's funny video and you've lost me.

Other things I put aside and don't do instantly because it will "take too long." Now I don't have a magic number for what too long is and I'm often surprised those things can be done more quickly than I realize. A good example of this is when I set the microwave to warm something for 2 minutes. Often  I stand and stare absently out the window for this 2 minutes. While there is nothing wrong with a quiet moment or two of speculation or meditation, occasionally when I'm there with the two minutes ticking on the micro - I'll do a few things around the kitchen. Recently, I washed my two travel mugs by hand and put them away. They lived on the counter for days because I "didn't have time" to clean them. Or maybe I just didn't feel like it, but that's a different blog.

My own perfectionist nature and my own sense of time and it being "wasted" or "stolen" is a challenge I've only recently recognized in my life. I've toyed iwth the idea of timing things. I'm not sure whether to take one day and time every single thing I do (which seems like it would be a pain and waste a lot of time in that one day) or do I take a few weeks and time every kind of event that occurs in a day. This may be something I revisit on and off this year. I feel like if I did this I could prove to myself that a lot of things don't take that long and some of the procrastination isn't really helping.

I read a business organizational book a couple years ago and it recommended when trying to get a desk or email under control, do everything that will only take 2 minutes or less on the spot, right then. Other things that need more attention need to go on an action, call, or project list for an appropriate time. I've tried to do this, but I often start say, responding to an email, and then discover I need to dig into some old emails or find a contact list from a conference, and the envisioned 2 minutes turns into 10 or 15. Or at least that's how it feels. If I timed it, I wonder, would that be true? Or possible is it worse than I imagine? Did it take 30 minutes? So was I wasting my time? Was it important enough to get that much time? (That's probably another blog and another self help book.)

If you were going to time events in your life, which ones would you be most interested to know how much time they took? I think my ipod has a timer, so I thought about using this and documenting a day or  a series of days. Though I sort of imagine "wasting" a lot of time that day putzing around trying to get the timer thing to work. huh.

An era is over

I'm staying at my grandparents house for the first time since my grandmother died last August. All my life I've stayed at my grandparents and awoke to sounds of plunking around in the kitchen and probably the smell of coffee. My grandparents have always been early risers and the older they've gotten been tinkers in the kitchen. Often we would chuckle as they both chatted in their respective corners of the kitchen and neither seemed to hear the other.

My grandmother died very suddenly from heart failure last year and none of us was expecting or prepared for anything of that nature. Other than a little high cholesterol we had no idea. As we always say, you can never be prepared.

Each time I've left their home for the past 10 years or so, I've wondered if it was the last time I'd see one of them. Someone else in the family has regretted their decision to live in a city away from everyone else, but I've tried to look at it as how fortunate they were to get to follow their hearts.

I don't necessarily regret the time we didn't spend together, but the loss of opportunity to make more memories. I struggle with the guilt of not being "there" wherever that might be since I am living mostly overseas for our work. But more than all of that, I just struggle with the bitter absence of breakfast sounds knowing that it will never be the same and yet rejoicing that I am so fortunate to have had my grandmother until I was 41 years old. I am learning to savor what I do have and have had, even while I swallow my tears.