Daylight Savings Vote

A few of my friends and I met up earlier this evening, er, late in the afternoon for an after work run around the neighbourhood.

As the winter approaches, daylight runs are going to get increasingly rare, and I’ll need to fish my running headlamps from storage and make sure they are charged up.

Of course, the unusual hour for our meetup prompted a long conversation on the subject of daylight savings time, that twice-per-year ritual of shifting our clocks by one hour.

Spring ahead. Fall back.

And also because tagged onto the upcoming municipal election ballot for next Monday is a province-wide referendum on the very existence of daylight savings time asking the population of the Canadian sliver of this timezone if we wish to continue the ritual.

Perpetually staying on one time, never shifting to adapt our clocks to the shifting wax and wane of the seasonal daylight flux would be less exhausting for at least two days of the year.

I would also mean that the diminishing daylight hours would lock into a regular cycle wherein the sun may not rise until late in the morning during the deepest days of winter, or alternatively set in the middle of the afternoon.

I’m used to running in the dark in the winter, but even I have to pause and wondering what the right answer will be when I vote on Monday.

Or what I’ll tell my grandkids some day: y’know we used to flip flop our clocks back and forth twice a year, everyone was late for work and grumpy, and then one day…

Unpoliticalish

It’s not that I’m not a political guy. In fact, usually kinda the opposite.

But I’ve made a very deliberate decision to keep this space fairly free of politics and opinion that links (directly) back to those topics.

That said, it’s election day in Canada and today the nation was off to the polls to pick a federal government.

Traditionally, I pour myself a glass of whiskey, settle onto the couch, turn on the television and watch with bated breath as the results start to roll in.

With a country as geographically expansive as Canada, there is literally a rolling in of the results as we cascade east to west waiting for election zones to close down and start reporting results.

My region closed a few minutes ago and numbers have started appearing on the bottom of the screenful of commentators on the CBC coverage.

The glass of whiskey will either be a celebratory drink or a mournful way to drown some political sorrows.

As of now I don’t know which, so I’m sipping and watching and sipping some more.