What time is it?

Byline: The Register-Guard

This is the weekend of the 23-hour day - the start of daylight-saving time, when clocks are set forward one hour. The shift makes for more daylight in the evening hours, widening the window for all the outdoor sports that are getting under way this time of year. It also means that cats hoping to be fed at dawn, which has been arriving at an ever-earlier hour, will leave their servants at peace for an extra 60 minutes.

Yet the arrival of daylight-saving time, welcome though it may be in some respects, inevitably has the feeling of a speedup. Even though the lost hour is nabbed early on a Sunday morning, the first several days of daylight-saving time always feel rushed. Our 24-hour days are already too short, so condensing even one of them to 23 has a noticeable result. It's a sure bet that some people will be late for Palm Sunday services, getting Holy Week off to a harried start. Expect some stragglers at work on Monday morning, too.

There's nothing about celestial mechanics that dictates the start of daylight-saving time on the first Sunday in April, or the reversion to standard time on the last Sunday in October. The time change is an entirely artificial construct, originally decreed as a means of saving energy during wartime.

Most of Europe switched to daylight-saving time a week ago, so if you're jetting off to Paris for lunch you'd better make sure you're not an hour late. Most Asian countries don't use daylight-saving time, so after we make the switch that business with the international date line will become even more complicated.

There is a limited degree of uniformity: All of North America - Canada, the United States and Mexico - is on daylight-saving time, and makes the switch at the same moment. Everywhere, that is, except Arizona, Hawaii, most of Indiana, Puerto Rico and Saskatchewan, which stay on standard time. Arizona is an especially complex case, because the Navajo Indian Reservation, the Hopi Indian Reservation and the rest of the state all have different rules for daylight-saving and standard time.

We'll get the extra hour back in October, when the return to standard time gives us a 25-hour day. That hour, borrowed from April, will come from a time when plum blossoms were on the ground. If an hour of spring can be transported forward to the darkening days near Halloween, interest on the loan will have been paid.