By Bonnie Brown
Columnist

Have y’all recovered from your Spring Forward time change hangover yet?  

It does take a minute (as the kids say) to get back into your groove.  I begin early in the evening changing what seems like an endless process of changing the clocks throughout the house.  

Over time, we have replaced many of our time pieces with radio-controlled clocks, often referred to as atomic clocks.   

These clocks are quite sophisticated, involving an elaborate system of lasers and atoms, which keep it precisely in sync with the official time clock in Boulder, Colo.  

Amazing, huh?  Yes, it is.  

However, the radio-controlled clocks are not always 100 percent accurate.  I can attest to this as I lost a lot of sleep the first Daylight Savings time change I experienced with my new radio-controlled clock.  I kept waking up to see if it had changed times.  When morning arrived, I was confused as to whether it had changed times or not.  I had to go to my old-fashioned analog alarm clock.  The high-tech clock had failed!  Perhaps these clocks fail because of human error.  

Perhaps it is set for the wrong time zone.  Sometimes the battery is bad.  It might fail due to atmospheric conditions, or physical obstructions that prevent synchronization with the time signal station.

There is one reliable time keeper in our home and that is our dog, Carly.  She is fed three times a day.  We get up early, so breakfast is about 6:30 a.m., followed by lunch at 11 a.m., and her evening meal is at 4 p.m.  Even when there is a time change, she is constant and almost always on time at appearing near her bowl looking for her meal.  

We have two chiming wall clocks and a grandfather clock, which also chimes.  We have long believed that Carly could tell time just because of our routines.  However, we have recently surmised that Carly is so prompt in her appearance by her feeding dish that she must be counting the number of times the clocks chime.  

I shared with husband Tom that sometimes when I treat her, I will say, “Good doggy!  Here’s your five cheerios.” But I may only give her three.  Now I’m convinced that she can count and wonder if she merely shakes her cute, fluffy head in puzzlement with the belief that I don’t know how to count.  

So, I’m happy to tell you all that Tom and I have pretty much adapted to the time change and have found the clocks that I overlooked before (and there’s always at least one) and changed it to the correct time.  Our sleep cycle doesn’t seem to be too adversely affected by the different time.  

We did, however, take note of the darkness in the first few days of the Spring Forward time.  

My thoughts are that the Spring Forward/Fall Back changes are a favorable adjustment in many ways, especially with families who have children.  It does have the upside of providing more daylight hours in the evening when children may have activities and the parents’ workday has ended.  

So, enjoy Daylight Savings Time and begin looking forward to the extra hour you’ll enjoy on fall-back Saturday, Nov. 2, when the time change takes place in the early morning hours of Sunday, Nov. 3.