Well, here they go again messing with the time. Just when I was getting up the strength to start walking in the late afternoon, the government turns the light out on me. Not to mention the fact that it took me half the morning to change all the clocks in the house. That is, all except the one on the DVD player, which I don't know how to operate anyway.

I hate daylight saving time (DST) and I think Benjamin Franklin was way off base when he invented it. I resent the government's tinkering with my internal clock every year, making it spring forward and then fall back. DST is outdated, useless, and downright dumb.

Yesterday I intended to have lunch with my mother and was to meet her at her house when she returned from church, say, about 12:15. I left my house about noon and as I passed her church I noticed cars still lined up, bumper-to-bumper.

Knowing that Baptist pastors rarely preach past lunch time, or long enough to miss the line at Home Café, I couldn't imagine what was going on. Maybe several people joined today, I thought, or they were having an impromptu business meeting.

I rode on down the hill to my mother's, sat in the front porch swing and waited. And waited. By 12:30 I was concerned. By 12:45 I was convinced the congregation was being held hostage by some crazed interdenominational group.

At 1:15 I was about to call the law when my mother comes wheeling in the yard. I rushed to meet her and watched as she calmly exited the car.

"Well, he preached another good sermon today," she said, totally nonplussed.

"What in the world have ya'll been doing up there?" I blurted, "Did the preacher lose his place? Forget his watch?"

It took a few minutes but we finally figured out what had happened. I had not changed my clocks. In my defense, my mother is usually the one who reminds me to change them and she had not, my husband was out of town, and besides, at 2 a.m., the obligatory time for change, I was (like any normal person) fast asleep.

Where did the idea of daylight saving time originate? Allow me to explain. The idea of saving daylight was first conceived, as I said, by Ben Franklin in his 1784 essay: An Economic Project. Great Britain, however, was the first country to set one standard time throughout an entire region, around 1840.

That was done to help synchronize railroad train schedules and gradually standard time zones were adopted in the United States and in Canada, as well. During World War II, the US observed year round DST from February 2, 1942 to September 30, 1945.

From 1945 to 1966 there was no federal law concerning its regulation. States and regions observed time as they so chose, depending on the whims of the local politicians.

The Uniform Time Act of 1966 established a system of DST within each time zone throughout the United States, except those states in which the legislatures opted to keep the state on standard time. These include Hawaii, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Eastern Time zone portion of Indiana, and the state of Arizona, except for the Navajo Indian Reservation. (As you can see, Georgia is not among the holdouts, unfortunately.)

There are many schools of thought as to the actual reasoning behind DST. One is that it was established to save fuel by reducing the need to use artificial lighting. Another is that it benefited farmers who needed optimum daylight to do their chores. Still another is for safety reasons. If we have more daylight at the end of the day, there will be fewer accidents.

To all of those reasons, I say "Hogwash." It's just another way that Congress can muck up our lives. And even they can't make up their minds about DST. In 1973 DST was observed all year, instead of just spring and summer.

The current system of beginning DST at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday in April and ending at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in October was not standardized until 1986. Over the years, supporters have come up with reasons to keep it, and detractors have come up with reasons to abolish it. Reasons, I might add, that have little to do with the original reasons behind its enactment.

There is rumor that the United States has planned a change to its DST observance beginning in 2007. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandates that DST will start on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November meaning that, in 2007 the start and stop dates will be March 11 and November 4, respectively.

I say, stop messing with the thing. Whatever happened to telling time solely by the sun? If the sun is straight up in the sky, it's noon. Is that so difficult to comprehend?

I'm sure the time debate will go on for a long time. We in America have trouble making up our minds about lots of things, especially if personal political agendas are involved.

As you may have already guessed, I have my own opinion about daylight saving time. I personally think Congress should take it and stick it...um,