I hate daylight savings!

Just thought I should get the rant out of the way first 🙂

I see absolutely no point in it. Yes, it gives you an extra hour of daylight in the evenings, but the payoff is it’s darker in the mornings. And I hate getting up in the dark. It’s only recently started to be light enough when my alarm goes off that I feel like getting up, and now I have to go back to getting up in the dark again for a month or so until the sun catches up again. Plus it’ll take me weeks to re-adjust my sleeping patterns. And all so we can have late-night barbecues or whatever it is we’re all supposed to be doing with all this extra light in the evening. Why can’t the people who want to sit out in their garden until 10 or 11 just buy some candles or something??? (Oh, and while I’m ranting, how come there was no consultation about the whole shifting the date for daylight savings thing? Nobody asked me if I minded the date being changed – we were just told it was changing. And our IT people at work have been tearing their hair out over it, because it’s going to mess up so many things. Hmmm, maybe that’s what the government mean when they say it saves electricity (which I don’t believe, because I’m just going to be turning more lights on in the morning instead of in the evening, so the net power use will be the same) – it’s because everyone will be switching off their computers in disgust for the next couple of weeks!)

Sorry, you should take it from this that I was rudely awakened this morning, because I forgot the time had changed. Ian had come over to look at the car (long story, the end result of which is that MrPloppy now knows what the symptoms of a flat battery are, and how to prevent one ;-)), and had arrived at the perfectly civilised hour of quarter to 10. Or at least it would have been civilised if we’d remembered to change the clocks last night, because then I wouldn’t have been still in bed reading my book, thinking I still had plenty of time before I had to get up. And MrPloppy was still fast asleep, so when Ian knocked on the door I was the one who had to leap out of bed and scramble around frantically for some clothes to go and let him in.


Looks like it’s going to be the day for visitors today. Lytteltonwitch just turned up to show me the secret project she’s working on. I’m sworn to secrecy, of course, but I can tell you it’s looking fantastic! 🙂

And I got a phone call from my brother – they’re moving down to Alexandra today, so SIL and the kids will be staying here tonight to break their journey. Brother and his BIL are driving the furniture truck down, and are planning on just driving straight through, but he said depending on how tired they feel by the time they reach Christchurch they might decide to spend the night here as well, in which case we’re going to have a very full house.

So I suppose I should be getting the house tidy and beds made up instead of writing this. But it’s 5 hours drive from Blenheim, so I’ve still got a few hours before I really need to panic…


The past week has been one of plenty of “culcha” (otherwise known as being out almost every night). On Monday and Tuesday nights we went to a Japanese film festival, featuring the anime of Hayao Miyazaki. On Monday we saw Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (which was just stunning – a really beautiful film), and on Tuesday Laputa: Castle in the Sky (which I didn’t enjoy quite as much, but was still good). We’ve definitely got to start getting some of his films on DVD – they’re just so amazing.

Then on Friday night I went with lytteltonwitch and her tramping club to Roger Hall’s new play, Who Wants to be 100?, at the Court. It wasn’t as good as some of his other plays, but was still funny, and the portrayal of life in a rest home was disturbingly accurate at times (I worked in a rest home one summer holidays when I was a student, and some of the stuff in the play could have come straight out of that place).

Oh, and I went to a talk on Wednesday by Philip Norman, who’s the Writer in Residence at the university this year, and who won the Montana for his biography of Douglas Lilburn. He gave a talk on Lilburn’s life and music, interspersed with film and music clips. Really interesting.


I’ve kept up the releasing this week (especially at the university, which has so many great opportunities for themed releases!), but no new catches, unfortunately:

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday


Currently reading: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (which I *almost* managed to finish this morning before my untimely leap out of bed)
Currently listening to: Half Moon Street by Anne Perry

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One Comment

  1. Try explaining daylight savings to an 18 month old with very settled sleep patterns. ‘nap time’ was heavily debated indeed and considering the clock says its half an hour till he should be getting up and hes still not alseep I’d say he won.

    I think the government didn’t worry about asking people if they agreed to shifting the date because an awful lot of people never remember when it is anyway so probably don’t even realise its changed.

    -pk-

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