Did you think I had dropped off the face of the earth? Nah! I just went to Nacogdoches for a few days. I didn't mention it before I left since it was all conditional on whether or not the plumber finally got my leaky faucet in the master bathroom repaired. Did you ever have a leaky faucet that was so leaky, you were afraid to leave home for more than an hour or two at a time? That's where I was. So, all's well. The faucet is fixed, I got to go to a Ladyjack and then a Lumberjack basketball game. I got to go see my nephew, Tim kick some butt in baseball on Friday. Then Saturday I got to drive the tractor moving dead trees at my parents house.
None of that is my topic today. My topic concerns time. It is top of mind simply due to the start of Daylight Savings Time which began very early in the morning on Sunday. It messes me up. It resulted in my sleeping until after 10 yesterday morning. This morning I even overslept. You see, I normally set an alarm for 8 on weekdays and forgot to last night. About 10 minutes after getting in bed last night I remembered. But there was already a cat laying across me and I was really tired, so I convinced myself that my cats would wake me up this morning. They normally have very good body alarms that wake them up at the same time every day. The issue is that no one told them about Daylight Savings Time. So, they woke me up at 9.
I love this time of year when it stays light later. It is conducive to getting outside and actually doing something. I like that! Not that I'm inclined to get outside and do something when it is this cold. But you know if it warms up and the weather is perfectly clear, I'm in! What I don't like is the time change itself. Why can't we just keep Daylight Savings Time all year? It would be so much more pleasant if you could drive home from work at night in December and it didn't always look like it was midnight, right? But I'm proposing keeping Daylight Savings Time year around just because I don't like the clock changes and my body doesn't deal well with it. It's all personal for me. It's going to take me at least a week to find and change every clock in my house. Part of that is due to the constant state of exhaustion that I am experiencing because the time changed by one hour. Based on my bodies response, you would think that we lost a day or two rather than an hour.
I don't deal well with time changes, I never have. But it is strange. It doesn't seem to matter which direction I travel, only the trip home gives me jet lag. How can that be? I think it has to do with adrenaline and my excitement of arriving in a new place. I can give you examples. It happens to me no matter where I go.
Once I left Dallas at 2 or 3 in the afternoon heading to Spain with a 4 hour layover in Amsterdam. I slept for about 4 hours the night before the flight, then worked half a day before leaving. On the airplane, I had an entire row of seats to myself so that I could lift the armrests and lay down. I took a Unisom to try to make me sleep during flight. I was able to sleep for a total of about 1 hour during that flight and that one hour was interrupted several times. Once we were on the second (fully loaded) flight from Amsterdam to Barcelona I was finally able to go to sleep leaning against the window but it was a very short flight, so I might have slept for another hour. When we finally got to Barcelona, I was pumped and ready to go sightseeing. I could probably have gone all night long. After that trip, I came home, slept all night long, then brought a blanket and pillow downstairs and slept for about 12 more hours on my couch. So, in that instance when I traveled East over the Atlantic, the time change didn't affect me. But when I came back West coming home, I was exhausted and slept for nearly 24 hours straight to recover.
This other time, I went to Hawaii. I was concerned that I would be exhausted when I got there since I was going West and I remembered what coming back from Europe had done to me. If you have ever flown from Dallas to Hawaii on American, you have had the same flight experience that I did. You get on an airplane in the morning in Dallas and fly all day. Perhaps you change planes on the west coast but you aren't off the plane for long. Then you arrive on Oahu at 3 or 4 in the afternoon. When we got to Oahu, I was pumped. There was surf, there was sunshine, there were fish to be eaten and Mai Tai's to be consumed. I had no time for sleep and fortunately, I wasn't the least bit tired. We had a great time for more than a week and even spent a day over at the Big Island. I was never even a little tired from all of the time zones we went through getting to Hawaii. Then we came home. Again, if you have ever been to Hawaii on American, you have also experienced the red eye coming home. You board the plane around 4 in the afternoon, travel all night long and arrive back in Dallas around 7 a.m.
I could barely drag my butt off of that plane. It didn't help that I came down with a cold during flight. When I got home, I once again drug a pillow and blanket downstairs which apparently is my custom after a long flight and slept on my couch for the rest of the day. Fearing that I wouldn't be able to sleep that night and knowing that I had to work the next day, I forced myself to get up around 6 that evening. Then I went to bed around 10 and slept until my alarm went off the following morning. That time I was traveling East.
So you see my confusion in figuring out what causes jet lag. Is it just the fact that there is a time change or does the time change have to be in one direction or the other and if so, why doesn't my body recognize this? And really??? Can simply moving my clock backward by one hour also cause jet lag? Seriously, if I am going to feel this way after a long weekend, I would like to be posting pictures of some exotic location that I spent time at this morning rather than a few photos of my nephew catching a Nacogdoches Dragons baseball game and the scoreboard at a Lumberjack game. But that is all I have to show for my weekend. So, I will end now. Maybe I should go upstairs and get my pillow and a blanket so that I can spend the day on the couch recovering from this horrific time change.
Have a good week.
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