It's time to fall back

In the spring we set the clocks ahead 1 hour to give us a longer period of sunlight. It was started several years ago when most people lived and worked on farms.

I love when daylight savings time begins because it means the sun doesn't set until about 8 PM. In October when we return to standard time it gets dark at 5 PM. It is just something that Benjamin Franklin came up with to take advantage of the most daylight hours. The sun is out earlier in the mornings as well during that time.

That is so funny! People hate it in October because they think they are losing an hour of sleep but it is really returning us back to regular time. There are a few states in the mountain time zone that don't switch. I guess it is because there was little agriculture in those areas.

By the time the day arrives I usually forget too, lol! By the way I love the sign language avatar! Coincidentally, I just commented in shibham's discussion on myLot avatars.

I really like it. I am going to be sorry when it changes this weekend and it starts getting dark earlier. At least the sky is nice at sunset (even though some of the colors are the result of pollution).

There is more morning light in the spring when it starts. When it is dark in the morning my body thinks it is still night and doesn't want to get up!

I don't EVER want to get up, so light or dark isn't an issue

LOL! I hear ya! But you have all those little mouths waiting to be fed that are not going to let you sleep in much.

actually, we "free feed" so they generally leave us alone unless the food AND water bowls are empty

Even then they will normally let us sleep if we fix it as soon as we get up!

Lucky you!

it does take a while for newcomers who haven't been free fed to get used to the system

I can only imagine.

Yup! I have one of those window shades that blocks light when I want to sleep in. The return to standard time is the beginning of things changing and the weather getting colder and not spending as much time outdoors.

Huh? HEHEHE. For WHO? I wish it would stay in the seventies. So far we haven't gotten there. LOL I do hate the winter when we might actually have cold weather for about three weeks. LOL

When I left the house yesterday I was sweating. By 6:00 the clouds had rolled in, the sun was fading and the wind had picked up. By 7:30 it was freezing! Did I mention I was not dressed for it? This morning I was still cold.

I feel for you, but it is supposed to be close to 90 degrees. We will be trick or treating in 80 degree weather easily. Do you know they don't really make light weight costumes for here? Since my son couldn't decide on his costume, I decided he would be a white tiger. White sweatpants are now striped with black marker. No one will be able to wear them this year anyway. It barely fits him. LOL I have a white t-shirt waiting for me to add the black stripes. Wish us luck tonight. LOL

I am really glad to hear you made his costume! People have been talking about the expense on something they seem to forget is optional and I wanted to know whatever happened to making costumes? Most of mine were made and they were all unique because of it.

LOL. Are you kidding? I am so last minute that I have to make the costume. I bought a witch's blode wig and put it on my daughter. A quick search through her clothes, rewarded us with a complete Hannah Montana costume.

My son was just adorable. Bless him because I completely forgot to look for a costume for him. I was going to do a hobo but I changed my mind at the last minute when I saw him wearing a $1 hat I bought at the Dollar Tree about two years ago. It was the head of a white tiger. I thought it looked great on him. My husband said I was gutsy to do his stripes free handed. I told him it was just stripes. LOL

Gee, you weren't painting a portrait of a tiger! Men are so funny! You should go to the dollar store and get some Halloween stuff on clearance and put it up for next year. Walgreen's has all it's costumes at 50% off. You can always recycle them into different costumes if necessary.

LOL. As for the costumes, I forgot to even look for the clearance ones. LOL You know I will be making another costume Oct. 30, 2010 just because I procrastinated too long to get a good one. LOL. I try to wait for my daughter because she usually changes her mind a million times.

See, that is why you have to get her into being a gypsy or fortune teller or something similar for Halloween. All you need to do is tie a scarf on her head and give her some big earrings and a long skirt and she is good to go!

HAHA. That is why she was Hannah Montana. I let her wear her clothes and I bought her a blonde wig.

You are hilarious! That is so funny! At least it was simple to pull off.

I get lucky every year with her. She's such a good kid. I was amazed I was able to come up for something for my son. I didn't know what I was going to do for him. Everything worked out though.

I was in the bathroom at a restaurant over the weekend and this woman came in with her kiss and I could see the son's legs from under the stall. He was wearing what looked like white sweat pants with black stripes!

She was telling him someone was already in the stall and that they had to wait and he said "Maybe it's an old person."

I wanted to crack up! I opened the stall and said "maybe not that old."

By the way he was a zebra, complete with hood, not a tiger. I guess he still wanted to wear his costume.

LOL. That is sooooo funny. Not only that they did the same kind of costume, but he was saying maybe it was an old person. LOL His mom is OLD to him at that age. LOL If you are past 30 your an old person. Get out the wheelchair and cane.

He has a great grandmother, he knows real old when he sees it!

LOL. So what are you saying? If you say you are old I will fall off of my computer chair. LOL

Honey, pay attention and read carefully; he said the person inside might be real old and then I stepped out. After they went in the stall there was a discussion about grandma.

Did that conversation including you looking like grandma? That is really important. LOL If it did, did you run screaming from the bathroom?

You do not have good sense!

Well... At least you are implying I have sense. That's a little more credit than most people give me. HAHAHA.

Pffffffffft! Seriously, you should try to write for "My Name is Earl" or the office or one of those other crazy TV shows.

If they gave me a chance I wonder if I could? As long as it wasn't one of the reality shows, I guess it would be okay. Maybe I could turn them all into a murder mystery. Earl of course would change into a "Sherlock Holmes" type character. LOL

Um... I think you are missing the point here, LOL.

HEHEHE. I got it. You think I am crazy. LOL I have enough reality television things going on in my life that I would want to escape it by watching something different.

My Name is Earl is not reality TV.

I didn't think he was reality unless he is kin to my family. LOL I never saw that show. He made a guest appearance on Hannah Montana one night while I was flipping channels for the kids. I had to stop because I think he was pretending to be a member of kiss or something.

My first cousin got married in a church where the bride and her family were not wearing bras or shoes, or both. My brother told me and I almost died laughing. Since then, after a year of marriage, she didn't get pregnant so she ran off with someone else. Needless to say they are getting a divorce.

See, that is the kind of stuff I am talking about Many couples get married at the beach or in Asian temples with no shoes; the no bra thing sounds like some hardocre feminist deal from the 70s.

She was 18! She didn't know the 70's existed! LOL I'm from the country and sometimes you can say backwoods, but I at least know etiquette and common decency. I may not use it, but I know it exists. LOL Her whole family ignores it. The kids are married off when they are 18 so the parents don't have to take care of them. Her father asked my cousin to go out with her. He was 37. Need I say more? It was just sad. My cousin is in love with being in love and he would do anything for anyone. His parents are still happily married. I don't know how he can't find the right person. He's been looking in churches and this is what he comes up with. Of course, she wasn't in the church.

He is obviously (cue music) "looking for love in all the wrong places..."

HAHAHA! LOL. That is too funny, but I have been telling him that for years. LOL

You should compile that song and some others on a Cd and give it to him for Xmas.

LOL. I can give him the 100 songs of his life. I just have to hit the country music cd's and start choosing titles. LOL

There ya go! I just checked my helium and I have 5 rating stars again! Hello rating bonus!

Wow! That's wonderful. Congratulations! I just checked mine and I am still at 79.9% so I may still keep my third writing star. LOL Maybe someday I will get five. I thought you got to keep the fifth star once you obtained it. I didn't think they made you worry about losing it again. I thought it was part of the new plan. Now I am confused.

Rating star woman! The yellow ones under the blue ones. When you have 5 of them you get a $3 rating bonus.

LOL. I just figured you had your five writing stars by now. LOL Okay my mistake. About the rating stars, do you just get the $3 the first month you have the 5 stars or is it every month even if you keep them consecutively. Like let's say I had the stars in Oct., Nov., and Dec., would I get the $9 total $3 for each month or would I just get the $3. I haven't been trying too hard to get those stars.

Rating stars are important. It is too easy to lose one if you are not rating a lot so you should always keep at least three since you will not get paid if you never rate. As long as you have 5 rating stars you will get the bonus every month.

When Scheng told me about the rating stars I misunderstood and thought I had to do 500 rates EVERY month! This is how I managed to keep my stars because my 90 day rate score was so high I just had to rate a bit each time I posted a new article to maintain them. That extra $3

can make the difference in reaching payout in a slow month.

That's what I was wondering. I really didn't think it was every month. I figured you had to lose a star one month and get it back the next to get $3. If it is every month that is almost a good deal. Guess I need to go back to rating. Right now I am in jeopardy of losing them. LOL

I just went and rated some articles so maybe I will keep my stars. I still have two left but the numbers are dwindling. I guess I will rate a few articles a day just to build it back up.

Keep an eye on what is says for your 90 day rates. Try to get the total up past 500 and then you can just do a few here and there to maintain it.

BTW, you have a lot of unanswered comments in your dicussions from the past few weeks.

How can that be? I must not have been getting emails. I guess I need to go look at that. My ratings for ninety days is low. It's no way that I will get to five hundred by the end of December. Oh, I will try though.

If you started today and did 10 per day you would have 310 as long as you completed them before the end of day according to GMT. You can easily do 15 to 20 rates in one day so you could definitely have 500 by the end of the month.

I doubt if I will even try. LOL I really need to write articles today. Of course, after what I read and wrote back, I may not have to worry about making over $2 on ac. LOL

Rating articles takes less time than these discussions and commenting on AC. Just do a little each day.

It's actually a little more time consuming than commenting, because on commenting you are just skimming the article. Helium you actually have to make an educated guess as to which one is written better. I think it's a little more difficult.

You skim on helium also. There are a lot of bad articles and articles that post the title even though you are told not to or have horrible grammar and spelling mistakes that you have to vote against. It is easy to look at the language in two articles side by side and see which is from the better writer.

If the first sentence and first paragraph do not state the topic and answer the implied question of the title that is a vote against. You don't have to sit there and meticulously scrutinize.

Some I skip like the video game reviews. I HATE those. Many I have seen before so it makes it easy because I already know the "value" of the existing ones. You have to look at it like proofreading. Some times it is a toss up between articles, but I usually do a few after each posted article.

Lately I have not been writing so I am just rating to keep the stars intact.

I always seem to get the articles that are written about the same or I get the ones where there is an exceptional article, but it doesn't go into the title.

I don't care how good an article is, if it doesn't hit the topic and if the toopic isn't covered in the first two paragraphs of one that does, it's an automatic vote against. If the other other article is poorly written but does hit the topic I will vote it slightly more valuable.

Yes, it will still get dark but right now it doesn't get dark until 6 or 7 whereas after the change it will be dark at 5.

Tomorrow I have nowhere to be (that I know of) so I won't have to worry about being on time to go anyplace.

Oh, I did wash a bathrobe yesterday that is the equivallent of a small load of towels. It is really heavy so I use it more for warmth. something had spilled on it so I had it soaking and of course someone else had to use the machine. I needed to leave anyway.

Hmmm, maybe your computer is a little ADD! You might want to check and make sure it is on the right date.