Using time as a variable

Hi. I’ve just taken and slightly modified a tutorial from actionscript.org. IT explained how to show the time in flash. I completed it and modified it to just show me the hours, minutes and seconds. I’m using it for a site I’m workin on. It was a tutorial for mx though, so I made a seperate swf an had it load into my site’s mian swf using the loadMovie script. Now I want to take the time experiance and push it farther. I want to know how I can take the time from the loaded swf (which has a dynamic textbox ofcourse) and use it as a variable. I want to basically two things:

how to get the variable from a loaded swf

How to have a variable control the tint of one MC and the rotation of another.

I’m having a MC fill the whole screen and tint to represent the darkness/brightness of the day and I’m going to have a sun/moon MC rotate past the screen.

Thanx for any and all help.