Daylight Savings Time

It's daylight savings time again. This is the time that I wish I lived in a state that did not practice this insane messing with time. We are losing an hour this time of year. I am a CNA in a nursing home on the day shift. We start getting residents up at 6 a.m. But with the time change, they are not going to be ready to get up at 6 because it's going to feel like 5 and too early to get up. Not to mention the exhausted staff who will miss that hour of sleep. In the fall, the residents tend to get up too early. The overnight shift starts complaining that residents are wanting to get up at 5 because they think it's 6 and ready to get up for breakfast. And it isn't just the nursing home population. It's anyone who has a day job, church attendees, and even pets and farm animals who are on a regular schedule for feeding, playing, and expecting families home. This disruption lasts for about 2 weeks but some, especially pets, don't ever adjust. Is all this stress really necessary? I may be wrong but I was told it was to get the farmers to work longer. Why? Don't they work hard enough as it is? So much of what they do depends on the weather rather than time anyway. So what is with making them work an extra hour? I have not heard anyone, no matter what their occupation, say they looked forward to daylight savings time. Can we just put an end to thee madness and do away with daylight savings time?

Winter

Winter finally arrived here in Northwestern Wisconsin. It took a long time. We should have had piles of snow in late November but we didn't get anything that stayed around until Leap Day! I am not a fan of winter. If I could move to a warmer state I'd go in a heartbeat. I don't mind a little snow for a day or 2 but normal Wisconsin winters are ridiculous. I hate the cold and snow and ice. This storm started the night of February 28th and continued all night and into the next day. Just my luck I was scheduled to work at 6 a.m. I drove the 12 miles at 10-20 miles per hour. It took 45 minutes and it was dangerous but so many had called in already that I had to make it. When I got to town, I found that even those roads hadn't been plowed. We're talking about ankle deep snow and it hadn't been touched by the plows. When I went out to my car at lunch time, the plow had been by our parking lot and plowed us all in. The guys had not touched the parking lot to clear the exits so if anyone had had an emergency, they were not getting out. I climbed over the snow bank into the parking lot well enough. But since they had not moved the snow or salted, it was icy. My feet slipped in opposite directions. Even as a teenager, I could not do the splits. I am less capable now than I as then. So I tried to at least keep my knees together. I ended up on my hands and knees with a great pain in my groin. I could not get up for at least a minute. When I did get up, I used my water bottle to help. Then the pain went from my groin to my knee. When I had gotten what I needed from my car, I had to climb another snowbank to get out of the parking lot and back to the building. I limped back to work. I made sure I told the nurses but they weren't too concerned. The next day, they decided I needed to see a doctor. As it turns out, I strained a ligament in my knee. I got the next day off plus the weekend I already had off and a knee brace for 2 weeks. Tomorrow is my first day back in a brace. It's going to be a long 2 weeks and in my opinion, winter is still the worst season ever!