Darkness falls...

Fall is here. This week has seen some interesting weather, with morning temperatures into the upper 30's on one morning, and the rain coming.

I've been watching the later rising of the sun with some degree of consternation. Lately, the twilight has just been hitting as I get to work, and on the clearer days I get a nice silhouette of Mt Rainier at the top of the stairs as I enter my building.

But this week, as I was finishing getting the house painted, I really noticed the earlier setting of the sun. The evenings get dark. The neighbor's dog barks because the end of the day is near, and he does the pavlovian thing of getting hungry when the sky starts getting dusky, because he doesn't know how to read a clock. Even a digital one. It gets difficult to do the things I want to do after work...

Four minutes a day is what we lose naturally. At least that's the number I remember from the Astronomy 101 class I took in college (while I was wasting a year getting into the Mechanical Engineering department).

And then, come another month or so, the powers that be decide to turn the clocks back and rob us of another hour of precious evening daylight, just so the kids, who couldn't care less, don't have to get driven to school in the dark in the morning.

There was talk some years ago about just leaving the clock alone... They pushed back the time change, but we're still monkeying with it.

Hey, if they could find a way to keep the sun up longer, I wouldn't mind that too. I want to up my mileage for some half marathons next year...