Losing time

If you travel all the way around the world to the west, one way and another, you're going to have at least 24 time zone changes that work like daylight savings time in the fall -- you get an extra hour to sleep. I say "at least" because our course squiggles around some, occasionally requiring a "spring forward" instead of a "fall back". The ship's clocks are always moved back at 2am and forward at 2pm, so we always gain an hour of sleep and lose an hour of afternoon. And India is half an hour off from everyone else, so there we gained half an hour we'll have to give back one of these days.

BUT ANYWAY. Tonight is one of the gain-an-hour-of-sleep nights. Maybe it's some obscure anti-pirate measure, we're in the Gulf of Aden until tomorrow at around 11am. But when 24 out of 112 nights is an extra hour long, it raises some conundra.

The ship's clock currently says 9:30pm, a not unreasonable time to start heading to bed. But the impending time change means that, in some sense, it's only 8:30pm, way too early for anyone over the age of four to be ending her day. But I'm sleepy. Yawning even.

I know, I could go to bed now and plan to get up a nominal hour earlier and do something worthwhile, like exercise or meditate or read something to improve my mind. But getting up is a challenge even when the clock says it's time.

What I usually do is believe the ship's clock. Right now the ship's clock says it's bedtime, so I will go to bed. Tomorrow the ship's clock will tell me I have another hour to doze, so I will doze.

Now if I could just figure out how we'll get back to where we are on the same calendar page as the US after crossing the International Date Line. I suspect it may involve having to give back all those extra dozing hours.