Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things: a friendly reminder about daylight savings time.

I've been planning this post in my head for weeks. Today is one of my favorite days of the year, shared by two of my favorite Springboro alums and two of the maybe five readers of this blog, Kendra and Emily. Today is the day we can legitimately begin to hope.

Winter in general can be depressing: I should know as my college roommate and I diagnosed myself online with Seasonal Affective Disorder back in 2002 (that link is to The Mayo Clinic...see I am not just neurotic. It's real!) . Winter in New York can be even more depressing: no hill in my non-existent front yard to sled down, walking to work is not only painful (head bowed against the wind, face being whipped, etc.) but it is time consuming (buttoning all of the snaps on my ankle length down coat, putting on and the removing of layers of sweaters, fleeces, scarves, hats, gloves) and generally unattractive (see previous parenthesis). My coat takes up an entire seat wherever I go out and I have to shamefully excuse it as if it were an unruly child or socially awkward friend. Beyond the apparel aspect, the shortening of days that begins when all of the finery of autumn is gone from the trees is heartbreaking. The fact that we gain an hour of sleep when we "fall back" is crap! I'm a teacher and it is still practically dark when *I* leave from school in the dead of winter. But enough of this talk.

Today we may lose one hour of sleep, but what we gain is incomparable! Daylight savings means that we really can say that spring is around the corner and mean it, not the way my mom and I try to say it in the middle of January to make ourselves feel better. Spring! Is! Around! The! Corner! Starting today we can look forward to the fact that THREE GLORIOUS SEASONS IN A ROW are within our reach and that the hopelessness that begins on or around January first is at its farthest for a whole year!!!

It really feels like a figurative new day today: the high is 60. I am planning on going for a run (though let it be known that I have been running in the cold for 2 weeks now). I have the motivation to go to the Farmer's Market at Prospect Park. I actually would rather go do things with my morning rather than sit around reading news online in my pajamas until 1 pm, followed by sitting around watching quality programming (see last post) until I finally decide I should shower and talk to people. There is fast paced music on in my apartment (Paul Simon! Phil Collins for my brother! ha.) not the melancholy, I-hate-the-winter kind of reflective music I often default to and wallow in. Who cares that on Monday I had my first snow day in 5 years! It's daylight savings!!

So. Feel free to hope today. Now that the days are getting longer, you can feel justified in your incessant talk of the impending marvelous season. Feel justified in your hope for flip flops and parks. Hope for smiling when you step outside. Hope for sitting outside and enjoying a beverage. Hope for Uncle Louie G's next door to finally open again for the season and sell me a delicious $2 vanilla chip Italian Ice (or The K, or whoever your local ice cream provider may be.) I can't contain myself. I may have to add an addendum to this post later today after I let it all sink in that this day has actually arrived. Sigh.