Dirty thoughts

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

I wouldn’t call it a prayer, exactly, but my hopes for 50 degrees were granted. I’m like one of those new nickel-cadmium batteries, one hour on the charger, and I’m good to go.

A couple weeks ago, I made the claim that George W. Bush had never done anything to make my life better or safer. I should have learned years ago from Dennis Myers that almost anytime someone says first, last, biggest, worst, all or nothing, they’re going to be wrong. Over the weekend, I remembered that GW had done something that improved my life. He reset the daylight-saving time clock. Unfortunately, I kind of picture it as him saying, “What? The president has the power to change time? That’s a power I must exercise.” But I don’t care. On March 9, the clocks will be set forward one hour.

You probably don’t pay as much attention to this kind of thing as I do, but when we pass the winter solstice, basically every day adds one minute to the time the sun sets and subtracts one minute from the time the sun rises.

On March 8, the sun will set at 5:58 p.m., and on March 9, the sun will set at 6:59 p.m. I think that’s so cool. In the space of one day, not just our digitals, analogs, ovens, microwaves, coffee pots, watches, odometers, but our internal circadian rhythms, will go from slow winter rates to woo-hoo-let’s-strip-off-half-our-clothes-and-find-a-water-source. Of course, then winter will return, and we’ll be all revved up with no place to go. But don’t you just love the feeling?

And I guess that brings us back to this week’s cover story. I can’t recall ever doing it in a garden, but it seems a fair bet that there are a lot of pagans out there who have. And they’re probably the same people who’ve been waiting for the earth/Earth to reawaken. And that doesn’t make it dirty.