![\"1219\"](\"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/1219-300x40.jpg\")
<\/p>\nHomeOwnerMan is socially conscious. \u00a0He’s been known to save a tree, or save the whales, and occasionally, when the fancy-schmancy envelopes come in the mail, he’s been known to save the date. \u00a0But recently the talk in the superhero circles had turned to saving daylight. \u00a0Mankind had spent\u00a0all winter winnowing away daylight. \u00a0Everyone drove their daylight-guzzling SUVs and forgot to turn off the sun when they came inside. \u00a0When they were through charging up their battery-operated daylight they didn’t take the time to reach down and unplug their daylight chargers. This\u00a0let daylight leak out of the trickle-charger and make\u00a0a puddle of daylight on the floor.<\/p>\n
In short, everyone was talking about saving daylight, but no one was doing anything about it. \u00a0 And HomeOwnerMan had a hunch why: \u00a0no mortal man could save daylight on his own. \u00a0It would take a superhero like HomeOwnerMan and an idea that had been around for thousands of years and was first implemented in Germany about 100 years ago. \u00a0The original German idea went like this: “What if we deprive everyone of an hour of sleep on the second weekend in March? \u00a0That will get them to stop complaining about wasting daylight.” \u00a0It was a diabolical plan, but it actually yielded some good things, like plunging early morning commuters back into the pitch darkness from which they were finally beginning to emerge. \u00a0And since the rest of the free world, except for a few exceptionally backward counties in Indiana, Michigan, and the Navajo Nation observed it anyway, HomeOwnerMan thought this would be an easy gig. \u00a0But he was wrong, and he was about to be enlightened.<\/p>\n
For one thing, Daylight Savings Time\u00a0usually fell around HomeOwnerMan’s birthday, casting a damp, moldy blanket over the birthday festivities. \u00a0Honestly, HomeOwnerMan would probably be in bed anyway, but it gave him a good excuse to be there on his birthday weekend. \u00a0Secondly, it always fell on Saturday night \/ Sunday morning. \u00a0Why? \u00a0Why not Tuesday so\u00a0you could go to work groggy on Wednesday? \u00a0And thirdly, why was it scheduled for the\u00a0middle of the night? \u00a0Why not go from 3:59 PM to 5:00 PM, jumping from late-afternoon snack right to quitting time?\u00a0 No one would complain about that. But that is not the way it works, is it?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As luck would have it, HomeOwnerMan and WifeGirl were scheduled to sleep at a friend’s house for daylight savings time this year. \u00a0This presented\u00a0a difficult first challenge- \u00a0the dreaded guest room clock from the 70’s. \u00a0The 70’s were great for many things such as glitter-wearing horn bands and jarts. \u00a0But in the arena of time pieces it was dominated by red LED clocks with \u00a0“time”, \u00a0“slow” and “fast” buttons. \u00a0HomeOwnerMan had long ago mastered the “press and hold the ‘time’ button while simultaneously pressing either the ‘slow’ or ‘fast’ button” routine of this genre. \u00a0The clock said 11:17 and since the clock only needed to go an hour ahead, HomeOwnerMan started by using ‘slow’ button. \u00a0But it progressed at a\u00a0snails pace, so HomeOwnerMan foolishly touched the ‘fast’ button. \u00a0The clock suddenly rocketed forward stopping at 12:21, \u00a0three minutes past the appointed time. That necessitated the maneuver known as “going around the horn.”\u00a0 This time he stopped at 12:16, but now he had to decide if another minute had lapsed while making the rounds. Should he go to 12:18 or 12:19? \u00a0And wait, was the clock 12\u00a0hours off? \u00a012:19 was in the AM realm so that would mean that the PM dot, a standard indicator on 70’s clocks, should be off rather than\u00a0on. \u00a0So this guest clock must have\u00a0been off by 12 hours at least since the previous power failure. \u00a0He advanced it to the next 12:19 (with no PM dot), and then debated with himself like Lincoln and Douglas\u00a0whether it was now 12:20.<\/p>\n
The next morning was uneventful at first. \u00a0Returning home from their soir\u00e9e\u00a0with plenty of time before the 11:30 Mass, a Mass they rarely attend, HomeOwnerMan had time to make the sweep of the house – the microwave, the range, the wall clocks, and the DVD player. \u00a0On the way to church he fixed the car clock, complete with uninterpretable German universal symbols on the controls. \u00a0In church they saw plenty of sub-humans who were normally from earlier Masses who had forgotten to spring forward. \u00a0 HomeOwnerMan knew he was better than them, and was over-confident that\u00a0he had all of his\u00a0bases covered. \u00a0He went to bed Sunday night having all but forgotten\u00a0about daylight savings time.<\/p>\n
The alarm went off Monday morning at 5:00 AM. \u00a0HomeOwnerMan woke up feeling that all was right with the world. \u00a0It was dark outside, which it should be just after “spring forward.” \u00a0He unfurled his yoga mat, and began twisting himself into a pretzel. \u00a0But he suddenly realized that his “pigeon prep” felt more like “frozen pigeon.” \u00a0The bedroom was colder than a brass casket. \u00a0HomeOwnerMan was once again foiled by the “spring-forward-fall-backward-set-back-thermostat.” \u00a0It was the thing he forgot every daylight Sunday\u00a0and was always rudely and briskly reminded on daylight Monday.<\/p>\n
Making his way in the dark to the thermostat wearing an undershirt and yoga pants, he looked through blurry eyes at the array of buttons labeled “mode”, “fan”. “prog”, “^”, “v” and “hold”, and a clock that said “Mon 4:05 AM”. \u00a0There was also a set of instructions that were printed in 0.2 point minimicromidget font. \u00a0He punched a few buttons and the display lit up. \u00a0The word “Hold” illuminated; he looked at the temperature which read “62\u00b0”. \u00a0“Hold” would be bad at this temperature, \u00a0so he forged on like a S.W.A.T. member diffusing a bomb. \u00a0Finally “Mon” started to flash, which meant he had stumbled into “time set mode.” \u00a0A few button-clicks later, the heat whirred into action and the time was finally set correctly. \u00a0There would be no frozen pigeon today.<\/p>\n
HomeOwnerMan: making the ordinary\u00a0extra\u00a0<\/em>ordinary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" HomeOwnerMan is socially conscious. \u00a0He’s been known to save a tree, or save the whales, and occasionally, when the fancy-schmancy envelopes come in the mail, he’s been known to save the date. \u00a0But recently the talk in the superhero circles had turned to saving daylight. \u00a0Mankind had spent\u00a0all winter winnowing away daylight. \u00a0Everyone drove their … Continue reading “HomeOwnerMan: Saving Daylight Time”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[24,9,11],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homeownerman-episodes","category-uncategorized","tag-daylight-savings-time","tag-humor","tag-superhero"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148,"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}