Sunday, October 16, 2005

The Worst of Times

This weekend we, along with Travis and Alicia, have been watching the Parkers' boys while they took a weekend away. (Lauren stayed with the Maberys). It's been a great weekend, full of trips down to the pool, to the park and, this afternoon, to McDonalds.

This morning I slept in. (We were up pretty late last night). I looked at my watch: 10:30. I walked out to the living room and started talking to Russ and Alicia. Russ mentioned something about the computers changing times. I figured that North America must have ended daylight savings time and the computers must have not been set for our part of Brazil. I say "our part of Brazil" because not all of Brazil observes DST. Eleven states do. Our state, Bahia, is not one of them. This is what I knew before I started trying to figure out what time it is.

We had two computers with two different times- 10:30 and 11:30. The TV satelite said 11:30. Watches and clocks all said 10:30. Still not sure.

I looked up what time it is in my "home" time zone, central. If we hadn't changed but they had, it would mean that there would be a difference of three hours. It was 8:30 so, I reasoned, it must be 11:30 here. One computer and the satelite were right. But as I kept looking, I discovered that DST had not yet ended in North America--there's still two weeks left (which I'm sure most of you already knew). So that meant it should be two hours difference still, making it 10:30. But then why did some things have other times?

With my new hypothesis about the current time, I started looking online. Every site I went to did not show the time. Weather.com said the statistics were for 11:00. Great. That helps. The average of the two.

I did a little more research about Brazil and DST. Yes, some states observe it but the list, and the dates that determine the beginning and end of it, changes every year. So maybe some years Bahia observes DST, I don't really know. But for this year, we don't. And this really is the day the clocks change, just not for us. I guess the satelite is just on some general time, so we'll just have to mentally convert it for the next few months. I think I've figured out the right time. Of course now, since I've taken the time to write this and stop the boys from crying, it's an hour later.

(If you're confused, we're still two hours ahead of central time. For the next two weeks, anyway. Then you guys "fall back" and it'll be three hours difference, like it was when we first got here.)

1 comment:

Matthew said...

Stop the madness!