Don't forget to REset your clocks...

I have a new-fangled bell-and-whistles sort of clock.

Actually my husband has a new-fangled bells-and-whistles sort of clock. It has dual alarm settings, a static-prone radio and/or a beep guaranteed to skewer your cerebellum as it slumbers in REM sleep, big buttons and little buttons so you can randomly flail at it when your cerebellum convulses in primal self-preservation, huge numbers that are bright enough to guide in aircraft and even on the "dimmer" setting give the entire room an NVG-sort of hue, AND (here's where I think my husband got suckered by the marketing language on the box) it automatically adjusts in the spring and the fall for Daylight Savings Time. So no more sleeping in or wandering the house with an hour to spare when you forget to set the clock.

EXCEPT that the clock is above such things as governmental whims like changing the weekend that DST begins. Pshaw - says our clock - Fall is here, "Fall back" time it is. Kind of like the automatic house in the short story that keeps vacuuming and serving meals even after the nuclear bomb goes off, our clock disdains the changes ordained from above and sticks to its schedule.

Which means, of course, that we can't stick to ours.

Yesterday morning, I got up thinking it was 7 o'clock and thinking I had an hour to spare. I was just getting ready to hop into the shower when my husband came flying in. "It's 8:02!" he cries. "The clock got us again!"

Now my cousin has a clock. And she brags about her clock. It's reliable, she says. It hasn't let us down for over 20 years, she says. And as I frantically dressed and threw my hair into a braid, I planned the covert operation that would avoid her crazy cat, defeat the hazards of her sometimes party-littered floors and claim her clock as my DST loot.

Anyways, by 8:12 we were at our Sunday morning posts (DH, admittedly, looked much fresher than I did). It was another hour before I got to have that shower and actually start my day.

And we get to do it all again next weekend...

Lock the doors, cuz. I may be coming.