About Time

I’ve been thinking about time lately—the tick and the tock of it. Sixty seconds turn into a minute, sixty minutes into an hour, sixty hours into a ...pauses to count rapidly...a long weekend? And would you please stop saying sixty already, I’m feeling that personally.

When I was parenting young children, the laws of time seemed more like serving suggestions than anything resembling actual laws. Someone told me that when it comes to parenting “the days are long, but the years are short” and that resonated.

Time flies---and it must fly like a mosquito because it seems we are always trying to kill it. If we think of time as a law of nature, Spring arrives on this day, at that hour. Summer will arrive at her appointed time as well. Then somebody mentions Leap Year and time seems more of a social construct than anything else; a community agreement we’ve all agreed to. 

Take Daylight Savings Time for example—except Arizona opted out of that one. “Nope,” they said, “Just not feeling it. Social contract, smocial contract. Sorry, not sorry, do not agree.”

 

Recently, I traveled across several time zones and back over a three-week period. Living on the edge—as I am wont to do—I made my journey on the eve of daylight savings time. I felt it was a good way to “share the jetlag”—sure, I was now four-instead-of-three hours behind everybody in the Big City, but my thinking was they would all be so blurry-eyed over “springing forward” the next morning that my exhaustion would seem “normal.”

 

During that three-week stretch I went from PST to EST—followed immediately by EDT. Eventually, I

This is NOT my cousin's farmhouse
Her's is livable. But you have to admit
that's a pretty cool house.

ended up in MDT—only to spend the next week dancing back and forth between Mountain Time and Central Time because Kansas is a hot mess when it comes to time. The counties that border Colorado are MT, the rest are CT. We stayed in my cousin’s family farmhouse in Cheyenne County—Mom! Colorado is touching me! —and driving down one of the gravel roads you could experience 5pm on the left-hand side of the car and 4 pm on the right-hand side of the car. 

Thus, proving the old adage it’s always five o’clock somewhere –and that’s undoubtably why the chicken crossed the road.

Bonus Content:

Big City, NYC

Bird City, Kansas

City Food (Peruvian) from Pio Pio

Back: Lomo Saltado Back: Filet mignon strips, stir-fried with soy sauce, spices, red onions, cilantro, tomatoes, served over french fries with white rice.

Front: Ceviche Limeño (Spicy) A Classic Peruvian Seafood Dish (raw) Tossed with a Citrus Juice Marinade. Diced corvina, lime juice, red onions, cilantro, rocoto pepper.

Kansas Food from Big Ed's
where the steak is apparently served by the pound

Kansas: Sunrise in the FlatLands

Mid day in Colorado Springs, looking at Pike's Peak