daylight savings time Archives

Daylight Savings Time Sucks. So Does Losing Your Neighborhood Market.

Fresh & Easy Store in Clovis. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m not up yet. I wrote this on Friday, before Daylight Savings Time robbed me of a precious hour.

When I do get up, I will be tired — and probably unable to string more than a couple of thoughts together at a time.

My favorite day of the year is the day we Fall Back. Getting an extra hour puts me in a wonderful mood, because no matter how late I am running (and for some reason, I am always running late!), when I glance at the clock and discover the time, I can relax a little, even if I have slept in.

I look forward all year to the day we move the clock back an hour. It’s better than Christmas.

But: Losing that hour every Spring hits me like a ton of bricks. It’s like having jet lag without the pleasure of having traveled somewhere. And for some reason, it lasts about as long. It takes me the better part of a week to adjust.

So I was thrilled when I learned of this thoughtful promotion in an email from my friends at Fresh and Easy Neighborhood Market:

Dreading losing an hour of sleep this weekend? We sure are! To make that “spring forward” a bit easier we want you to have breakfast on us. Come into your favorite fresh&easy Neighborhood Market on Sunday the 10th or Monday the 11th and get a FREE six pack of freshly baked Plain or Everything Bagels.

Just bring in the coupon available at here to get your free bagels. (You can save a tree and scan it straight from your smart phone.) There’s no purchase necessary.

Feel free to share the coupon with your friends, family, readers, and followers. As always, our bagels are only made with ingredients you can pronounce.

#StillFighting for more sleep the good food fight,

The Fresh & Easy Team

The coupon is only good today and tomorrow, so if you are fortunate enough to live near a Fresh & Easy market, go ahead and download it NOW.

My local F&E opened just last year, in a building vacated at the beginning of the recession by HOWS Market. And as Joni Mitchell said, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone: I had no idea how often I ran to HOWS for “one last thing” until it wasn’t there any longer and I needed to drive 3-5 miles every time I realized I was out of things like onions or lemons.

Our little local shopping center suffered for a couple of years without a supermarket anchor. Fresh & Easy was a godsend — especially as it opened the same week we lost our Northridge Gelson’s.

Fresh & Easy is not the same as Gelson’s — but in some ways, it’s better. Our family loves their fresh Il Fornaio baked goods, their own branded snack foods, and their fresh ready-made meals. (My daughter’s favorites are the delicious chicken soup and Asian-style beef and broccoli.) I especially like their selection of deliciously inexpensive wine.

Right now, the chain is trying to woo customers with the slogan “Still Fighting the Good Fight.” Those of you who follow the grocery wars will understand the double meaning: In December, Tesco (the British supermarket giant that owns F&E) announced that they were thinking of pulling out of the US market. Last month, they notified their customers that while Tesco is “looking at all options” for the chain, there are no plans to close… yet.

They’re doing a lot more advertising now, with more emphasis on low pricing than how fresh and easy their products are (I suppose that’s already stated in the company’s name). I want to see them succeed.

In the meantime, I’m going to walk over there and pick me up some free bagels. As soon as I wake up.

I received no compensation for this post. I just don’t want to lose another neighborhood grocery store.

Clocking In

Have you noticed how many clocks and devices with clocks you’ve got in your house? Just in my kitchen there are digital clocks on the oven, microwave, coffeemaker… and an analog wall clock way up high above my sink.

And we won’t even talk about the digital clock in my car, which needs to be reset by a few minutes every few months. This is OK if it’s running slow, because then I only have to push it forward a minute or two. But it’s dreadful it it’s going fast, because then I have to run through an entire 58 or 59 minutes to get it right. I usually just let it run fast.

Of course, there’s the annual time change when we gain an hour, which I generally love. But I really hate having to go around the house calibrating all those clocks.

Thank goodness for the devices that are ALWAYS accurate: our cable boxes, computers, iPads and cellphones. I am old enough to remember having to call a phone number to get the correct time. It’s nice to have something to refer to without making a phone call.

it often takes me a while to update the clock in the car. You’d be surprised at how long I can put it off by just reminding myself that it’s really 1:00 instead of 2. It usually doesn’t get fixed until I get into the car, think I’m horribly late for something and rush to my appointment — only to kick my heels for 30 minutes because I arrive too early.

And I’ve given up on doing anything to the coffeemaker. It’s nice to wake up to a freshly made pot, but setting that thing is such a pain in the ass, I eventually came to the conclusion that making it’s really no big deal to make it myself.

Several years ago, I purchased a clock radio from Brookstone that promised to make my life easier twice a year, by automatically updating itself overnight when the time changes.

Then Congress decided to change the dates for Daylight Savings Time.

The dates on that clock were hardwired in. So the time continues to change on the old dates — which means we have to change the thing FOUR times a year instead of twice. And sometimes we forget — as we did this morning, when the alarm did not go off at 5:30, because the clock said it was 4:30.

Fortunately, we only overslept a little bit, thanks to our Circadian rhythms, If only we could rely on them and not have to use a clock at all.

But I’m still tired. Guess I’d better make that pot of coffee.

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