Time Change

Twice a year time changes in Alberta. In March clocks spring forward an hour while in November they fall back. This year's switch happened while the champagne flutes, decorations and lights from Gala Odyssey 2010 were starting to come down, late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, whichever way you like to look at it.

Back in the late 1990's when I was program director of the OK Radio Group here in Fort McMurray, part of my job was programming the automation to deal with the extra hour of time in the fall or the loss of the hour in spring. The technology that allowed the radio station to run on auto pilot in those days was a Neanderthal cousin to what we have today. Songs were contained on large reels of audio tape embedded with a series of silent tones that triggered the next item in the DOS programmed sequence of events.

Commercials, splitters and other station identifiers lived on "carts" in a massive numbered cart deck. (In contrast, everything in 2010 runs on computer, timed down to the second and all coming out of one box)

I woke up on Sunday morning and did the slight biological reprogramming required and was pretty much back on track. For Heather and Ben the story has been slightly different. They've both been getting up with me at my normal time shortly after 6 in the morning. Their biological clocks are still on the "old time".

In Saskatchewan, where I grew up, our clocks never changed. Geographically located in the Mountain Standard Time zone that stretches from the mountains of Alberta to the lakes of Manitoba, the green province lives in what they call Central Standard Time. Legislated under The Time Act (1966), the Province does not ascribe to the Daylight Savings Time notion rather aligning with Alberta during the summer and Manitoba during the Winter. When we called relatives in other provinces, we always had to do the math as to what time it was in their neck of the woods, being careful not to call too early to too late.

Time marches on. Time in a bottle. Time is on my side. Time: never constant, always in a state of change.

November 10, 2010 - 199.6 pounds, 29.6% body fat