MAINE, USA — This weekend we "spring forward," losing an hour of sleep but gaining daylight in the afternoon, as we shift the clocks ahead an hour.
The move back and forth between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time is always reason for debate.
An online petition is going on change.org, signed by more than 200,000 people, saying we should choose one time and stick with it, year round. It also mentions that states, including Maine, have proposed making Daylight Saving Time permanent.
Eliminating the clock change isn't so easy nationwide.
The time zones are large; the extreme eastern point of the eastern time zone falls in our state -- it's Lubec. The western point is on the upper peninsula of Michigan.
Take Ontonagon, MI, for example. Its latest sunrise in the winter is 8:42 in the morning. The latest sunset in the summer there is nearly 10 p.m.
On the eastern end of the time zone, here in Maine, the earliest sunset is more of a problem for most people. It's as early as 3:46 p.m. in Lubec in December. In the summer, the earliest sunrise is at 4:41 a.m.
Say in theory, we don't fall back to standard time, and all of the eastern time zone stays on DST year round. In Maine, the earliest sunset now becomes a more manageable 4:46 p.m., giving us an extra hour of daylight on winter afternoons.
But in Ontonagon, the earliest sunrise now becomes a brutal 9:42 a.m., making this an unlikely solution for the entire time zone.
There have been proposals in Maine, New Hampshire, and other New England state legislatures to move to Atlantic Standard Time -- which would mean essentially staying on Daylight Saving Time year round -- putting an end to the biannual clock changes, and leading to more daylight on winter afternoons.