By Homer Hirt
Several months ago I happened across a quote “Make use of scraps of time”. I promptly printed out several pages of this message that I thought quite uplifting, cut them apart and made a nuisance of myself by passing them out to members of the Sneads Methodist Church. Some folks questioned me, and some looked at me as though I had lost my mind, a thought that runs through their brains more and more as I age..
Then yesterday during my daily walk along U. S. 90 I began thinking about time itself. I know that seconds make minutes, minutes make hours and hours make up our days. I won’t belabor the concept of how many seconds there are in a day, but we do know that there are twenty four hours, and with a little left over. The leftovers bunch up and soon we have to have a Leap Year, and we give February an extra day every four years. Remember the old rhyme “Thirty days hath September…….all the rest I can’t remember”. This messes up calendars and used to confuse our old date/time wind-up watches. I recall once writing up a field engineering report for the thirtieth day of February. This did not impress my boss very much.
Of course, one tradition for Leap Year is that a woman can propose marriage to a man during this time without embarrassment. My late wife Theresa proposed to me three times one Leap Year, and I finally accepted. Then she wanted me to get down on one knee and propose on my own! I told her not to push her luck. There was still time for our President to have his own war, and send for me.
So we have irregular months, containing anything from twenty eight days to thirty one days. Our Congress, many years ago, decided that Daylight Savings would help us win World War II. I don’t know that it did, but it left a nation victorious and confused.
Several years ago my daughter, Ashlee the Nutritionist, was being moved from Pensacola to Daytona Beach by her company. She had a large Rottweiler and she knew that it would be some time before she could find a home that would accept the dog, so I agreed to keep her in our pool yard. Sasha picked up the habit of stationing herself on our patio at about 5:15 AM, looking through the family room and the hall into my bedroom. If I did not stir, she would bark once, and after a few minutes, again. This would continue until I got up. Sometimes the neighbors got up, also. Then the time changed. I had no trouble setting my clocks ahead or back, but I never figured out how to reset a 110 pound dog.
Shipboard duty gave me a new sense of the importance of time. The Navy had to have its ships working together, so messages were timed and dated according to “Zulu” time. This is the time that it is on the Prime Meridian, or Greenwich Mean Time, in England. On the individual ships, however, we went by local time, but did not pay any attention to AM and PM, just began with 0001 and ran it through 2400. Even our clocks showed 24 hours. It took a while for a new man not to count up on his fingers to determine what time it really was.
A holdover from sailing days was the bell system, whereupon the ship’s bell was tolled every thirty minutes, up to eight bells, when it started all over. In olden times one man was stationed to turn the “glass”, upside down every time the sand ran down, approximately every thirty minutes. I would think that wet days would cause the sand to run more slowly. Even then it was probably more accurate than clocks, which were non existent on ships because all of them were pendulum timepieces.
Of course the commanding officer had to get into the act. A Dutch tugboat skipper wrote that the captain of a ship was the best argument for the existence of a Supreme Being that he knew. He reasoned that the captain did not think he was God, but he was certain that he sat at His right hand, and assisted in controlling the Universe. On all Navy ships at noon the Officer of the Deck sends a messenger to the Captain. The messenger salutes and says” Sir, the Officer of the Deck sends his respects and reports that it is 1200, and the chronometers have been wound”. To which the Captain replies” “Very well, make it so”. In other words, it isn’t noon until the Captain says it is.
That’s close enough to controlling the Universe for me!
Several months ago I happened across a quote “Make use of scraps of time”. I promptly printed out several pages of this message that I thought quite uplifting, cut them apart and made a nuisance of myself by passing them out to members of the Sneads Methodist Church. Some folks questioned me, and some looked at me as though I had lost my mind, a thought that runs through their brains more and more as I age..
Then yesterday during my daily walk along U. S. 90 I began thinking about time itself. I know that seconds make minutes, minutes make hours and hours make up our days. I won’t belabor the concept of how many seconds there are in a day, but we do know that there are twenty four hours, and with a little left over. The leftovers bunch up and soon we have to have a Leap Year, and we give February an extra day every four years. Remember the old rhyme “Thirty days hath September…….all the rest I can’t remember”. This messes up calendars and used to confuse our old date/time wind-up watches. I recall once writing up a field engineering report for the thirtieth day of February. This did not impress my boss very much.
Of course, one tradition for Leap Year is that a woman can propose marriage to a man during this time without embarrassment. My late wife Theresa proposed to me three times one Leap Year, and I finally accepted. Then she wanted me to get down on one knee and propose on my own! I told her not to push her luck. There was still time for our President to have his own war, and send for me.
So we have irregular months, containing anything from twenty eight days to thirty one days. Our Congress, many years ago, decided that Daylight Savings would help us win World War II. I don’t know that it did, but it left a nation victorious and confused.
Several years ago my daughter, Ashlee the Nutritionist, was being moved from Pensacola to Daytona Beach by her company. She had a large Rottweiler and she knew that it would be some time before she could find a home that would accept the dog, so I agreed to keep her in our pool yard. Sasha picked up the habit of stationing herself on our patio at about 5:15 AM, looking through the family room and the hall into my bedroom. If I did not stir, she would bark once, and after a few minutes, again. This would continue until I got up. Sometimes the neighbors got up, also. Then the time changed. I had no trouble setting my clocks ahead or back, but I never figured out how to reset a 110 pound dog.
Shipboard duty gave me a new sense of the importance of time. The Navy had to have its ships working together, so messages were timed and dated according to “Zulu” time. This is the time that it is on the Prime Meridian, or Greenwich Mean Time, in England. On the individual ships, however, we went by local time, but did not pay any attention to AM and PM, just began with 0001 and ran it through 2400. Even our clocks showed 24 hours. It took a while for a new man not to count up on his fingers to determine what time it really was.
A holdover from sailing days was the bell system, whereupon the ship’s bell was tolled every thirty minutes, up to eight bells, when it started all over. In olden times one man was stationed to turn the “glass”, upside down every time the sand ran down, approximately every thirty minutes. I would think that wet days would cause the sand to run more slowly. Even then it was probably more accurate than clocks, which were non existent on ships because all of them were pendulum timepieces.
Of course the commanding officer had to get into the act. A Dutch tugboat skipper wrote that the captain of a ship was the best argument for the existence of a Supreme Being that he knew. He reasoned that the captain did not think he was God, but he was certain that he sat at His right hand, and assisted in controlling the Universe. On all Navy ships at noon the Officer of the Deck sends a messenger to the Captain. The messenger salutes and says” Sir, the Officer of the Deck sends his respects and reports that it is 1200, and the chronometers have been wound”. To which the Captain replies” “Very well, make it so”. In other words, it isn’t noon until the Captain says it is.
That’s close enough to controlling the Universe for me!
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