Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Living Daylight

A new day awaits! A day of sight-seeing and window-shopping again in Den Haag!

Little that we know that today is the start of Daylight Savings Time!

We vowed to escape from the humdrum of Delft into the diplomatic playground of Den Haag today, barring weather conditions.

The alarm clock on the sidetable showed 9:00 when I finally stirred from my slumber. It was a tiring week. What with my mom in the hospital, Sadia having a terrible cold and a number of sleepless nights.

So we ventured downstairs as wont to prepare Sadia's breakfast and ours. French toasts, it's decided since her cereal mixed with formula milk has been out of favour for two days now. Unfortunately, the eggy taste was duly rejected by her fastidious Royal Highness.

Suddenly, in the midst of gulping my coffee, my husband exclaimed, "It's almost 11!" He was referring to the digital clock on our Mac.

What? I didn't believe him at first since we had just woken up. Has time passed by so quickly that we took 2 hours to eat breakfast? It's quite discombobulating!

While he hit the commode, I flipped through the tv channels and overheard on BBC someone on the morning cook show saying something to effect of 'turning back their clock'. Can it be? I wonder.

I pressed the Ceefax transmission of BBC to put my temporal confusion to rest. It confirmed my suspicion. The UK time on the Ceefax page was in sync with the time in the Netherlands! That's impossible!

After checking the internet on the date during which the clock changes, I quickly informed my husband who was dressing up upstairs. It's true then! The time was brought forward an hour. The Mac laptop even knew better than us. Talk about artificial intelligence!

Despite having to rush for the Den Haag-bound train at noon, I am glad daylight savings has come, well, to light. It means extra daylight outdoors to engage in more activities! The downside to stretching the daytime means Maghrib comes at 8ish!!! And I have quite some days to replace my Ramadan fasting....Oh well, I'll just sahoor close to 5am! :)

Written on Sunday night, published Monday 10:15 am (or 9:15 am in 'old' time)
comic credit thanks to cartoonstock.com

4 comments:

Blabarella said...

I didn't know squat! Was awoken that morning by prayer calls on my PDA & when i was about to shut it off (uzur laa), i groggily saw a message on my phone saying something about daylight savings & how my clock would be adjusted. H kept saying no la, no announcement or anything pun on TV! TV clock still said the 'old time', he hopelessly argued. So, we called reception. True enough!

Luckily we were on a free & easy day that day, otherwise we would have missed all our appointments!

All this daylight savings thing confuses & disorientates me. Worst thing is, I've got another one coming at me in Egypt some time late April. Argh!

(Ya, me too, failed 2 capitalise on the shorter periods to ganti puasa.. Sighs)

Theta said...

Luckily you had a person to inform to you of the change.

We needed a LAPTOP to tell us that the time has changed!

After 10 years out of college, it'll take me some days to adjust back!

Unknown said...

When I was in UK, I always looked forward to this change. Having more daylight hours is more cheerful of course. Many people suffer from depression in winter. Now I know the value of the smiling sunshine that we have plenty of here and yet we complain of it being hot here. We are never satisfied..and that is being insatiable humans I guess.

Theta said...

Me too! I mean ever since we moved here, there won't be a day that goes by that I find myself wishing for a sunny, warm day!
Luckily enough, this week the weather has turned better.
How I am glad that we live in a tropical country! (with the occasional A/C of course!)