The story of all good mornings is the same

Our old bedroom alarm clock was stupid. It could do one thing: display the time. Well, technically it could do two, but monshu and I are natural risers, so it takes extraordinary circumstances (like foreign travel) for us to need to set the alarm. I think I've set it once, maybe twice this year? In any case, in addition to being stupid and old (monshu has had it since before he met me) it was also cheap. This wasn't important because we asked so little of it.

But Sunday I was setting it back an hour and it up and decided its thankless life of toil was finally at an end. No great loss. We had two other fancier alarm clocks standing in reserve. One was a gift from my mother. It has a radio. And it generates white noise (in five different flavours). It projects the time on the ceiling or wall. Oh, and it's capable of resetting itself.

Ask me how I know this.

Yesterday I was surprised how early I was up. As mentioned before, I'm a natural riser; I normally wake up sometime between 7 and 7:30 a.m., later if I'm especially tired. So I was surprised to see that it was 6 a.m. given how rested I felt. I snoozed a bit more, then decided to read in bed for a while. (There were less than two chapters left in my crime novel when I'd decided to call it a night.) I got up, got some tea, messed around some, came back downstairs--and noticed in passing that the time on the DVD was an hour later than what the alarm clock said.

Apparently, the clock can be set to update itself according to an atomic clock it stays in touch with by radio transmission. And apparently you select the time zone by means of another switch on the back because it was set on Mountain Time. I changed both settings and then set the time ahead six minutes, an old habit that dies hard. At least, I thought I did; this morning I was initially surprised by how much extra time I had when getting dressed, then I was shocked how little was left when I returned to the kitchen to unload the dishes.

Not that getting out of the house on time ultimately mattered that much. The huge crowd gathered at the shuttle stop boded nothing good. When the shuttle finally pulled up, I recognised the driver as the usual one from two runs earlier. Bless her, she did her best to cram everyone on, but I wasn't feeling very sardine-like this morning, so Snore King and I were the only two left behind.

Fifteen minutes later, the driver for the run before the one I was initially trying to catch showed up with a nearly-empty bus and it stayed comfortably uncrowded for the whole trip. On the down side, he is the most cautious bus driver I have ever seen, so you will never make up time on his run. Still, fifteen minutes late is manageable, and I got to sit and read my novel instead of trying to maintain my balance amid a jumble of elbows and overstuffed knapsacks.

Now if we could only fix that damn clock.