THE ROBOT VOICE IN THE NIGHT

The robot voice spoke in the night, disturbing the silence of the dreaming household.

There was a beep, then a string of unintelligible words. Befuddled by sleep, I couldn’t make out the words at first, had no idea what the message meant. No alarm screamed. No dogs barked out an urgent warning. There was just the persistent beeping. And the calm words.

Which finally resolved themselves in my foggy brain: “Low battery.” And again. “Beep. Low Battery.” Every thirty seconds.

What a freaking pain in the rear. Why is it that the batteries in the smoke detectors that are required by law in every home always run out in the middle of the blinkin’ night? Never in the daytime, when it might be reasonable to haul out the ladder, scrape up a new battery, shove it in place of the old one, and test the alarm at ear-piercing decibels without waking up the dogs, cats and people who were happily dead asleep at 4:00 a.m. before the female version of HAL started with her dire warning.

At least this particular smoke detector was conveniently placed in the hallway, where the ceiling is at a decent eight-foot height. Several years ago, I had the same problem with another alarm installed far up in the vaulted living room ceiling. That one just dispensed with the robotic warning and decided to let me know there was a problem by going off at random times, shrieking at nothing late at night or in the middle of the afternoon and responding to no blandishments of any kind to “shut the hell up!” I replaced that one with a new unit boasting a ten-year battery. Take that, spawn of Skynet!

I find it ironic that the battery that disturbed our sleep last night decided to give up the ghost a mere three days before it was due for replacement as part of our usual routine maintenance. Sunday, we advance our clocks an hour for Daylight Savings Time, at which time all good citizens are also advised to change our smoke alarm batteries. Apparently, that was not soon enough for our diva batteries.

Well, now we’ll only have to circle the house looking for clocks to change Saturday night. (My poor husband went ahead and changed out the batteries on the other alarms while he was up before dawn today in his PJ’s.) I don’t really have a rant to share about the time change; I’m neutral on that subject. My body tends to wake up with the sun anyway, so I’ve already been opening my eyes earlier and earlier as the days grow longer. I’ve always said I would’ve made a great cavewoman. I could have spent most of the winter hunkered down, telling stories around the fire in the cave and emerging only now as the weather warms and the sun returns.

And I wouldn’t have had to deal with smoke alarms in the middle of the night.

Cheers, Donna

 

 

WEEKEND UPDATE, 2020 STYLE

As if this year from Hell hasn’t brought enough trouble, our family is dealing with an urgent health emergency this week concerning a beloved elder. So, today’s post will offer no extensive discourse on the state of the world, or science, or fiction, or anything much else. But there is a lot going on this weekend, for which I can provide these brief reminders.

It’s Halloween! Celebrate however you can, but safely! (Because the scariest thing out there right now is the huge uptick in coronavirus cases.) I plan to park myself on the couch with some popcorn and an adult beverage and watch some scary movies. Check out my review of some perennial favorite creature features on my podcast website My Moviehouse My Rules.com.

There’s a full moon! Yes, on Halloween night. This is a so-called “blue moon,” (meaning it’s the second full moon this month) also a “hunter’s moon,” giving night hunters light to stalk by. Conclusion: don’t be out in the woods to make yourself prey for some furry, big-toothed creature.

Good news, we gain an hour on Saturday night! Set your clocks BACK on Saturday night (actually, Sunday morning at 2:00 a.m.) to gain an extra hour for the loss of Daylight Savings Time. Those of you with animals and/or young kids at home have nothing to celebrate in this, of course, because those creatures do not understand time changes AT ALL! They will still demand to be fed at the regular time, which will appear to be an hour earlier by your new clock. *sigh*

Finally, early voters, get it done! This weekend (either today in some cases, or Saturday) is the LAST CHANCE for citizens in many states to vote early and avoid long lines at the polls on Election Day. So, voters in Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, if you haven’t done so already, don your mask, get thee to your local early voting place, and do your duty! Don’t bother mailing an absentee ballot at this point, it’s too late! Drop it off at a designated drop box or your local board of elections office to make sure your vote counts!

Cheers, Donna

WHAT'S THE TIME? IT DEPENDS

Let’s get this straight. If you hate this time of year because all of a sudden it’s really, really dark when you emerge from the cave of your office at 6:00 p.m., you don’t hate Daylight Savings Time. Here in the United States (or in most of it, at least) we just ended Daylight Savings Time. 

For the next few months we are all stuck with Standard Time, that is, with the time we all agreed was “normal” not so long ago. You have it reversed if you curse DST for the sudden lack of daylight at the end of the day.

Besides, hate if you must, but if you were a Neanderthal, you would just curl up in your furs and go to sleep when the sun disappeared. The dividing of the day into hours, the days into weeks, and the rest is a relatively modern obsession, a consequence of the rise of civilizations that saw a need to record harvests and the deeds of rulers and other details of their histories. Illiterate populations still don’t fuss with minute divisions of time. It was common for Gambian villagers in my Peace Corps days to say they’d visit “when the sun was going down.” Or they’d recount something that happened in “my father’s father’s time.” Set a meeting with village elders for precisely 10:00 in the morning and you could be waiting a long time.

Peace Corps Volunteers fresh from the States (or, earlier, British colonial officials) might get incensed over that kind of thing, but Gambian villagers certainly wouldn’t. Because, you see, time is relative, a convention agreed to by the participating parties. Even science concurs. Einstein once explained (and I’m paraphrasing) that an hour flies by if you are in the arms of your lover, but seems forever if you are in a boring university class. The same hour has different values in different contexts.

 

Salvador Dali shows time is flexible.

Still, even once a given civilization has determined to capture time and confine it within the daily framework of hours, minutes and seconds, it’s not so easy to tell exactly what time it is in any one place. It was not until 1883, when U.S. and Canadian railroads devised standardized time zones across the continent, that any kind of agreement existed here. Previously, localities often set their timepieces by a prominent clock in the town—at the church, on the town hall or even in a jeweler’s window. 

Daylight Savings Time (or War Time) was devised to save electricity during World War I. It was quickly repealed after the war. (See, DST haters, you are not alone.) But another war came along with the same need for saving light and DST was reinstated as a year-round system in 1942.

After 1945, states and cities were free to choose whether they stayed on DST or not. But this led to chaos, with some localities choosing one way, and some the other. On one stretch of road between Moundsville, WV and Steubensville, OH, for example, a traveler would have had to reset her watch 35 times. 

Something had to be done. In 1966 the Uniform Time Act became law establishing DST nationwide to begin on the last Sunday in April and end on the last Sunday in October every year, effective in 1967. (At least Congress held back from making it year-round.) Starting March 11, 2007, DST was extended another four to five weeks, from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November. Only two states currently opt out of DST: Arizona and Hawaii.

Of course, how our characters measure time while they’re out having adventures in space can be problematic, too. Talk about jet lag! In my Interstellar Rescue series, space travel is accomplished via a mapped system of “jump nodes,” or wormholes. Time is distorted in these nodes and can be manipulated with intricate quantum physics. (Don’t ask me for the details, I’m a writer, not a ship’s engineer.) Using that quality of the jump allows my Rescue teams to return alien abductees back to Earth with no loss of “real time” in their lives.

But it’s still necessary to keep time onboard ship—using the common naval system of three watches and 24 hours—and within the allied galaxy—using Galactic Standard Dates (GSD). The GSD measurement was developed for use in Confederated Systems space and is based on tiny fractions of the rotation of the galaxy around its center. The alien slaver Minertsans use a different system all their own, based on the circuit of their planet around its sun. 

After all, every civilization with the ability to move among the stars would have some form of timekeeping. An obsession with time would seem to be a prerequisite to the exploration of space.

But as for that dark at the end of your day here on Earth, just remember it’s winter, when the face of our hemisphere is tilted away from the sun. No matter how we manipulate our timekeeping, there are just fewer minutes of sunlight every day. You could hibernate until spring. Or you could hang on until December 21, the date of the Winter Soltice and the longest night of the year. After that, the light comes back, a little more each day. No matter what time it is.

Cheers, Donna