Falling Back 2023

For years, I've blogged about our twice a year time change.  Spring ahead, fall back.

Tomorrow, in the United States, we "fall back" an hour at 2am, and resume Standard Time.  This will last until March 10, when we will "spring ahead" an hour, and spend the day totally disoriented.

I'll be disoriented tomorrow, too.

For years, people have been trying to either get us on year round Daylight Saving Time or year round Standard Time (the time we are falling back to tomorrow).  As of now, many states have passed measures to make one form of time permanent but federal legislation is needed to allow these laws to go into effect.  My state, New York, has seven bills pending but none have made progress so far.  There are bills to both make Daylight Saving Time permanent (which needs federal legislation) and one to make Standard Time permanent (which does not).

If we aren't careful, we may end up with a patchwork of states on Standard Time or Daylight Saving Time. (People in Indiana may still remember when, during the summer, part of the state was on Eastern Daylight Saving Time, part on Eastern Standard Time, part on Central Daylight Saving Time and part on Central Standard Time.  I didn't live in Indiana but I traveled through it on occasion, and it was confusing.  This was fixed in 2006, when the entire state implemented Daylight Saving Time.

Arizona and Hawaii have year round Standard Time.  However, the part of the Diné land that is in Arizona observes Daylight Saving Time so they can be in sync with their territory in other neighboring states.

Meanwhile, some doctors think that we would be more healthy with year round Standard Time.

Confused yet?

So are we.

Bottom line:  until we make up our mind (and don't we have so many other pressing matters?) we will keep going through this twice a year ritual.