Created_at date/time if off by UTC-5 hours?

Hello -

My model has created_at and updated_at which get set automatically, as
expected, but the time is 5 hours off. For example, if I create a new
record at 7:15:25 AM the created_at time shows 12:15:25.

I suspect this has to do with my time zone (Eastern Time, United
States). But if I do a Time.now, it shows the correct time.

Does the Timestamp class use a different zone than the Time class?
How can I tell Rails (version 2.2.2, by the way) that my time zone is
Eastern (UTC-5) ?

Or, maybe this is a MySQL issue? If so, how can I tell MySQL about
the time zone?

Thank you for any help on this,

Steve