March 10, 2024 ~ Sunday morning (sunny/warming up … first day of daylight saving time this year! Woohoo!)
OMG … I can feel winter sloughing off of me as I type. It’s to be 65° today here, despite it being not quite mid-March. I’ll take it. AND … we turned the clocks forward last night. Hello Daylight Saving Time … how I will love you for the next seven and a half months (until Nov 3rd, when we “fall back”). Yes indeedy, I am thrilled.
Let there be LIGHT!
And so we have it. Thank god! Winter (here) hasn’t been horrible (I’ve gone through much worse) but six months of brown and ugly is about five months too much. I need green … and with this “springing ahead” of time – I know actual Spring is just around the proverbial corner and with that all things green and flowers. Yippe and yahoo!
We have sprung forward an hour which means, darker in the morning and lighter in the evening. Again, I’ll take it! I always thought (wrongly) that Daylight Saving Time first began to help out the farmers with their harvesting. Not so. Apparently, (after a little sleuthing), I found out that it was initiated as the “Standard Time Act of 1918”, a wartime measure for seven months during World War I, adding more daylight hours to conserve energy resources. Year-round DST, or “War Time” (as some used to call it), was implemented again during World War II. Huh. (However, Hawaii, Arizona, and the US territories do not comply with this – don’t ask me why, it’s too confusing!). And, just FYI – farmers were against this as it decreased an hour of morning daylight for them, meaning they had to rush to get their crops to market.
In any case, it will be lighter later here and I am as giddy as a girl on the day of a school dance. I’m as giddy as an unsupervised dog with an open bag of dog food. I’m as giddy as a hippopotamus being fed pumpkins. Well, you get the idea. Giddy and … happy as a clam!
And, while I’m happy this morning – my brain, like in a car on The Wild Chipmunk roller coaster, has veered around a corner and I wonder – are clams really happy? How does one know? How can one tell? The phrase “as happy as a clam” is derived from the full phrase “happy as a clam at high water.” Clams are collected during the low tide; and during the high tides, they are safe from fishermen. Who knew? (Maybe fishermen and clams!)
But, are they really “happy”? Oddly enough, a little click on the internet gave me this ditty:
How happy are clams really? Happy as a Clam? Not! | HuffPost Entertainment
Kerala, India – A highly respected scientist has determined, contrary to popular belief, that not only are most clams not happy, they are in fact severely depressed! Dr. Patra Gupta, of the Kerala Institute of Undersea Study, monitored over 1,000 clams closely for seven years.
I don’t know which is sadder … that clams are severely depressed (according to this study) or that some scientist spent seven years doing this study? WHY? What sort of benefit to mankind (or clams) was to be done with this study? So weird.
And speaking of clams … my dad used to replace the word “dollars” with other words … smackers, bucks, dough, moolah … and (the determined-to-be severely depressed) clams. So called “old-timey slang” that he, no doubt, got from his dad (who was born in 1896 and was in his prime in the 1920s and 1930s when this terminology developed). The slang term for money would have been popular among 1920s bootlegging gangsters, with the word clam being used as a term for a dollar. It was somehow derived and based on the use of shells as currency in ancient societies and some Native American tribes.
Doing a little research on this, made me think back to the holiday the kids and I spent in Copenhagen. It was glorious. It was fabulous. It was COLD! OMG – it was SO cold. I knew I’d never wear it again, so I didn’t buy one of the gorgeous fox stoles that were sold (everywhere) at the Christmas markets … but damn, I wished I had. They were so beautiful and would have kept me so much warmer. I’m not a proponent for fur sales/wearing but my god, they were beautiful … and dyed … magenta, emerald green, sapphire blue, ruby, eggplant, chocolate, mustard. Stunning! I should have gotten one!
Anyway – while there, we went to the National Museum. It was amazing! The display room I remember most was the “money room” (speaking of clams). This collection of Danish money is the most comprehensive in the world and is called the “Royal Collection of Coins and Medals” having over a half million pieces … money, medals, stones, and other objects related to means of payment. That’s a LOT of clams! And it was displayed like a jewelry store would display pieces … gorgeous! Glass encased drawers and drawers of coins and whatnot from centuries past. It was divine. I’d go back just to see that one room again!
And, here I am – having veered off course – again! I was going to write more on light today, and well, this is how my brain works … being happy as a clam, and then the brain railcar goes down the bivalve track and then veers off to the money route … which morphs into a visit to a museum … and well, hope you are following along!
Anyway, here I am now thinking of bivalves – again – (bivalvia – aquatic invertebrates found living in sediment – usually sand) … oysters, cockles, scallops, mussels, and (those severely depressed) clams … nice as shell souvenirs from the beach but I’m not a fan of eating any of them. My mom loved scallops. My daughter used to enjoy mussels – but I think she read something about them and decided not to eat them anymore. Kind of like me and lobster – the garbage cans of the ocean – however grossed out I am about them, it’s not going to stop me from eating one from time to time (so good)! Hey – I eat Hostess cupcakes and those things have a shelf life of 1000 years and will certainly kill me off before consumption of a little sea poop!
And, again, in thinking about all those sea creatures … and especially cockles (I had to look them up/a cousin of the clam but sweeter and less briny in nature) … and that horrible, horrible (tragic folk tale) song came to mind about Molly Malone who wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets, wide and narrow, selling cockles and mussels – alive, alive, oh! Egad. That is now going to stick with me for at least a week. Maybe two. Maybe longer.
In any case, clams (happy or not) be damned … I’m going to throw something on the grill later and am going to sit outside in the extra hour of sunlight we’ve got and enjoy the heck out of it!
As it was written, and translated from the Bible versions written in Hebrew and Greek, “light – let it exist” or as is stated simpler … Let there be LIGHT!