Future posts display 2 hours late

Hello, everyone!
This is my first post in the WP support forum.
I hope I’m doing this right. 🙂

Just a little info about my blog…
UTC offset = -5
On the front page (index.php) I display posts from the current day only (see CODE 1).

So, here’s my problem…

I want to have a certain post display at 12:01 (midnight) of the next day (so if today is the Saturday, I want my post to show up on Sunday at 12:01am).

So, I set the day and date and post timestamp for 00:01, and check the “Edit timestamp.” I wait for my post to appear at 12:01 am, and nothing. The post shows up at 2:01 am, 2 hours late.

And another thing.

I have today’s date displaying on my site, with the code (see CODE 2) in my header.php file. For some odd reason, the time is 2 hours behind the time that appears on the Options page (Default time format Output). So, my posts from the current day always get cleared at 2:00 am, not at 12:00 am as they should.

Does anyone heave any idea why all of this is happening? And perhaps how to fix the problem?

Thank you.

CODE 1——————————-
This code is placed just before THE LOOP (if (have_posts()) : …) starts:

$current_day = date(‘d’);
$current_month = date(‘m’);
$current_year = date(‘Y’);

query_posts(“cat=-63&year=$current_year&monthnum=$current_month&day=$current_day”);
——————————-

CODE 2——————————-
$current_dayName3 = date(‘l’);
$current_monthName3 = date(‘F’);
$current_dayNO3 = date(‘d’);
$current_year3 = date(‘Y’);

$current_hour2 = date(‘h’);
$current_min2 = date(‘i’);

echo($current_dayName3 . ‘, ‘ . $current_monthName3 . ‘ ‘ . $current_dayNO3 . ‘, ‘ . $current_year3);
——————————-