Date weirdness

I think I am losing my mind. I have some time zone converting code, and I just don't understand what I am seeing. Also my system seems to return the wrong time after I do some date operations on unrelated objects. This is from a machine that is in eastern time. I want to convert to, for example central time: $ndate = new Date(date("Y-m-d H:i:s")); echo $ndate->format("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"); 2013-03-28 15:35:07 <- this is the correct time $ndate->setTZbyID("EDT"); echo $ndate->format("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"); 2013-03-28 15:35:07 <- still correct $ndate->convertTZbyID("US/Central"); echo $ndate->format("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"); 2013-03-28 10:35:07 <- this is wrong it should be 14:35:07 $xdate = new Date(date("Y-m-d H:i:s")); echo $xdate->format("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"); 2013-03-28 19:35:07 <- HUH? This is wrong - should be 15:35:07 What in the world is going on here?