Daylight Savings Time is Stupid

I'm going to start with a couple of pictures. First, here are Beth and I arriving at work last Friday at 7:30 AM:

Second, here is a picture I tried to take of Beth this morning at 7:20 AM, on our way to work:

For starters, yes, I know Beth isn't in the second picture, so shut up, smartypants. there was a delay while the flash got ready and it was below zero so I wasn't going to wait around with my mittens off to get another shot. But once you move past that, the basic difference is that picture #1 was taken in daylight and picture #2 was taken in the dark. That's what Daylight Savings Time does to Alaska, and its not appreciated.

Usually, when something wierd is going on with daylight up here, its because we're so far north. But right now we've basically got a pretty standard 12 hours of daylight, so that ain't it. Instead the problem is that we're so far west.

Think about it this way: in Anchorage we're 32° west of Los Angeles (150°W vs. 118°W), but the time difference is just 1 hour. If you travel 32° east of Los Angeles, do you know where you are? You're all the way in eastern Alabama, about 30 miles from Georgia and the Eastern Time Zone. If you went a bit north into Indiana or Michigan, you'd actually be in the Eastern Time Zone. So if 32° of longitude should be 2-3 hours of time difference, this should tell you that Anchorage is basically just in the wrong time zone. Basically, we were already having the equivalent of Daylight Savings Time all winter.

Now we're into double-savings. Today the sun will be directly "overhead" (you can ignore the quotes if you face south and then get into a pushup position) at 2:09 PM. We're as close to having daylight when we start work (7:30 AM) as we are to having it when we go to bed (9:30 PM)!

Here's my idea for how Daylight Savings Time should work in Anchorage: backwards. Mornings are so dark in the dead of winter that it wouldn't matter if the sun rose at 11:15 instead of 10:15. But pushing sunset back an hour would mean getting home in daylight for all but the darkest couple weeks of winter. Then, when you reach this time of year and the sun is still up well after dinner, Daylight Savings Time would get taken away. That way it would be light in the evenings and in the mornings. And we wouldn't even need blackout curtains to go to sleep until almost May!