November 5, 2019 – My cat isn’t on standard time yet!

         Day two, no, day three and my cat, Jasmine, is still on day-light savings time.  She is now hungry at 4 a.m. instead of 5 a.m. and I am not enough of a good sport to get up in the dark and walk the full length of the house to give her a handful of kibbles to tie her over until morning – real morning – like 6 a.m. which is still before the dawn breaks.

         “Leave me alone!” I snapped at her as I awoke with the full weight of my  plump cat standing on all fours on my left shoulder.  No wonder I have a sore left shoulder – this is day three of this nonsense.

         Jasmine pops me with her paw and I feel her dangling claw on my lower lip – gosh, I don’t need to be scared for life just because I don’t know how to find the reset button on this cat from day light savings time to standard time.

         I pull the covers over my face and say, “Go get up Daddy, he will feed you,” even though I can hear his sound asleep breathing.

         Then the meowing – next the scratching viciously on the back of an old chair I saved for her scratching post,  then, more meowing and then her galloping up and down the hall, skidding around to get our attention.  Next, she attacks the rug in the writing room – scratching it – “pop, pop, pop,” as her claws snag and release it.  In the end, Jasmine runs and leaps onto the bed and pounces on Daddy and he is obliging enough to get up with her before the crack of dawn as I feign deep, deep sleep.

         We, like most homes have an assortment of clocks.  I have an old-fashioned, non-electric Big Ben alarm clock that runs on batteries and it’s ticking ten feet away from my bed which can keep me awake.  [See Blog July 27, 2018].  I dutifully changed that clock Saturday night knowing we had to “Fall back” as my Mom and Dad always called it.  That is a good thing – “Spring ahead and Fall back” – a simple axiom to remember over the years.  My  problem is – I can’t figure out how to fix certain electronic clocks.

          How did we get here discussing this – oh yeah – I have a sore shoulder and I keep my reading light directly over the left side of my chair in the living room.  I was wondering if I was turning to the left too much to read and causing a sore shoulder – now I don’t think that is the case.

         This morning, after hearing my husband deal with Jasmine – the fat cat who thinks she is starving, he feeds her and makes coffee early.  Meanwhile, I luxuriate in the bed – oh yes, extra time finally to snuggle in.

         The aroma of coffee finally gets me out of bed and after I pour my cup and walk to my arm chair in the living room I stop dead like Sherlock Homes pouncing on a clue and ask – “Why is my light moved?”

         Now, wasn’t my husband startled about that,

         “Doesn’t take you long to complain, now does it?”  He shot back as he thought he had done a good deed. He continued,  “I was changing the time on the clock on the wall, the screw that holds it up is loose, it will probably fall down.” 

         Hearing this explanation, I pull my chair out and successfully catch the clock coming off the wall under my mere touching it.  He was right about that.

         “So you wanted it to break?”  I don’t mince words before I have half a cup of coffee in my gullet in the morning.

         “It shouldn’t be there to begin with,” is his next retort.

         “That is the only wall available for it.”  Is my definitive answer.

         After half a cup of coffee, I vacuum and dust behind and under the chair and around the lamp. While I am at it, I empty the entire eight-shelf coffee table between our two easy chairs and dump all my junk on the couch to sort out later.  I love the organization of it – hate the dusting of it – you can’t have both I have deduced.  I dust his side and put it back and then I settle down to my coffee to mine my grey cells for where I put those new packages of picture hangers.

         At the end of my first cup of coffee, I have a flash of where those picture hangers are and retrieve them along with a hammer.  New picture hanger installed, clock successfully rehung, I proceed to the stove clock in the kitchen.

         First I have to remember how we do this – after several false starts – I finally get it to the right time after several minutes of pressing the + arrow to “dink, dink, dink, dink . . . .”  in order to move the time by minutes and make the hours flip up.  I was “dink-ing” the wrong way and after I realized how far I had gone – it was a long “dink-ing” process until I got it to the right time.

         Now, when I remember the “Spring forward for day-light savings time” I can also remember to “dink forward” correctly of “dink backwards”, I might get this changing of time into a routine – a twice a year routine. Yeah, what kind of a routine is that?

         My husband has a digital clock he uses and I will leave it up to him to change “his” time.  This morning – Tuesday, I am gently reminding him again to change his clock.

         Oh, I forgot the clock on the electric coffee pot – I no longer use it since I’m enjoying my Melitta coffee filter/pot system [See Blog May 7, 2018] – let the husband deal with that one, too.

         Just now I look at my newly hung clock, “Honey, the time is 10 a.m. – not 11 a.m.”

         “I changed it – you must have changed it back when you were messing with it.”

         I squinted my eyes at him thinking it’s too early for a serious argument about who did what. I’ll need another cup of coffee before that skirmish.