Saturday, June 21, 2008

Sunrise, Sunset


I started on this post a few weeks back and then realized I should hang onto the thought until the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, which is today! The daylight hours here in Paris have become incredibly long: today the sun rises at 5:47 am and won't set until 9:58 pm. Compare this with back home in DC where the sun rises at roughly the same time but sinks below the horizon a full hour and a half earlier.

Don't get me wrong, I love having more daylight hours. I got bummed out in the winter when the sun didn't show its face until nearly nine and the day was almost over when the kids got off the school bus at four. There's just one downside. It's that I tend to take my cues from the light, not the clock. I'll be puttering around after dinner, thinking it's 7:30 or 8:00 and all of sudden, I realize that it's almost 11 and I still haven't accomplished half of what I need to get done before bedtime. We have to draw the curtains tight to get the kids to sleep at a reasonable hour and the Eiffel Tower doesn't start its nightly light show until 10. As of tomorrow, the days start getting shorter again. The other bit of good news: summer is officially here.

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