May 13, 2016 3 min read

Not to brag, but my bedroom is in a different time zone. It’s 7:30 in the bedroom, 7:20 in the bathroom and 7 in the kitchen. I’m either a time traveler or the clocks are wrong. Since I don’t have a DeLorean or any sort of contraption fit for H.G. Wells, I decided it was the clocks.

During a brief power outage some time ago, the clocks became untethered from reality as we know it, unmoored from the very time stream. It’s all wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. In other words, I set them incorrectly. There is good news. The microwave is not blinking midnight any more. Except at midnight.

It turns out the kitchen clock was the closest to right. It wasn’t completely right, but it was the closest. The most right timepiece was the cellphone, which gets its information from space (which makes very little sense when you think about it). Luckily, the cellphone was the only timepiece in the house that didn’t rely on my abilities.

Frankly, it’s a good thing the kitchen clock was close to right. It was the hardest to change. I had to take it off the wall and use a Phillips-head screwdriver to properly align it.

A bunch of clocks on different times can make a person crazy. Crazier, if you will. Now I had a dilemma. I’ve gotten used to knowing that the bedroom clock is 20 minutes fast. I’m afraid if I reset it to the correct time, I will forget it is right and sleep later than I planned. Twenty minutes is a hefty amount of time to sleep through. Except at midnight.

Now I have to wake up, check the alarm against the cellphone and decide if it’s time to get out of bed. In the early morning, it seems like an incredibly complex mathematical equation. It’s not. One is right and one is wrong. I should just go by the right time, but it’s usually an interesting text or Facebook message that prompts me to rise from my slumber.

Of course, the clocks are the only thing that’s running fast in my house.

That’s a blatant lie. I live in the same house with a marathon runner. My niece Brittany lives in the basement apartment since her parents moved to Ohio. It’s just not as funny to say nothing runs fast in my house except the clocks and my niece. See. Nothing kills a joke worse than the truth. Except at midnight.

Sorry. That is literally a “running gag,” and I couldn’t help myself.

OK. Three things run at my house, the clocks, my niece and the jokes. Sometimes the jokes run so fast they will get away from you. See above.

I only run to the refrigerator during commercial breaks. My memoir will be titled, “Confessions of an Iced Tea Addict.”

But I digress, like I do. Even with the superfast alarm clock, I am still behind schedule. How does that happen? I have more to say about this, but I’m out of time and space.