Apparently, the clocks went back last night, putting us back onto ACST (Australian Central Standard Time, or South Australian Standard Time) – which is 9.5 hours ahead of GMT/UTC (or 8.5 hours ahead of British Summer Time).

The first I knew about it was when I glanced at my PC clock and saw that the time was before I thought I had gotten out of bed.

I checked my phone, and that agreed with my PC – so I checked my radio alarm in the bedroom. That was an hour ahead – aha!

So I googled for the information – and found the SA government’s information page.

The thing is – I remember the radio news bulletins in the UK during the week leading up to the clock change, and they would stress every 30-60 minutes on Fridays and Saturdays (at least) to remember to switch the clocks. Never heard a peep from the radio about it here – it would probably take up a valuable advertising slot (when a typical radio station only plays 6 standard length songs in an hour, things are getting bad).

The other crazy thing about all of this is that, until a year ago, South Australia switched their clocks the same weekend that the US and Europe switched yours. This makes sense, because then you don’t have to worry about figuring out if they’ve switched yet and how much time difference there is based on that.

The problem was that the eastern states all changed on a different weekend. But instead of bringing them into line with SA, Europe and the US – those states bullied SA into syncing up with them. So, depending on the time of year, we are now either 8.5 hours ahead, 9.5 hours ahead, and 10.5 hours ahead.

Still – it’s actually a nice surprise to find you have an extra hour in the day. Thankfully, I hadn’t set the alarm, so I woke up when I just wanted to wake up.

Okay, so the year is already one fortnight on (which means it is almost 4% over already!), but the past month has been quite busy, and this is really the first chance I’ve had to get back on Horus Kol and post for a while.

Christmas was great – although I ended up working all the way up to Christmas Eve (and then ended up back a week earlier than I should have been) thanks to one of those projects.

I spent most of my time over at my parents, even the week I was working, and in between all of that I had my Nan and cousin visiting and staying up at there, too. Also, we moved Samantha, Dan and Alyssa to a new home in the south of the city (on New Year’s Eve), and then there was Lachie and Megan’s wedding (which was great, and good to see them married, too).

Amongst all this, I have probably shot about 400 pictures on the Sony, which will take me some time to process, filter, and then post on the website. Thank goodness for digital, at any event, so I don’t have to develop all of them before I decide what’s good and what’s not.

So, I’ll be getting more photos up on the site soon enough – along with a bunch more posts and things about life and stuff. I’m planning on getting out and using my camera as many weekends as possible this year – including some travelling out of Adelaide, and even inter-state (I’m also planning to get a car sometime) – so Horus Kol ought to be a busy site, if I can ever find time to post.

Again, Happy New Year! to all – and I hope that when you get to 2010, you can look back on 2009 as another great year.