Bed Time

I rarely have problems or confusion when traveling into a different time zone.  This is because we live in a house that has many of its own time zones, and we deal with that every single day.

In our living room, for example, you can sit in one spot and see at least three clocks, all of which are set at slightly different times.  I usually just try to take an average of the three when I'm trying to guess the time.  We don't do this on purpose; it's just the way it worked out for that room of the house.

The kitchen is currently on "Blink Time," because for some random reason our power went off momentarily yesterday.  So at the moment everything is blinking 12:00.

The bedroom is a whole different story.  There are at least four clocks in the bedroom, and they're all set radically differently for psychological purposes (or possibly "psychotic" purposes, if you prefer).

These clocks are set in such a way so we confuse the heck out of ourselves in an effort to get up in the morning.  My clock radio is set seven minutes ahead of the real time so that when it goes off I can hit snooze and then wake up just as the news is starting.  I always have a brief moment when the alarm goes off and I think I need to get up immediately, but then I'm so excited and happy to remember that I can hit snooze!  And if I don't feel like listening to the news, I can always hit snooze again.

Whoever invented the snooze button should, at minimum, be elected the Ruler of the World.

Mrs. Smoot has some other weird time setting on her clock.  She often gets up at ungodly hours of the morning to go to work, so I'm sure her methodology is a bit more complex.  I believe that she has her radio set something like 23 minutes and 12 seconds fast.  I'm sure it involved some sort of complex equation, and I prefer not to think about it too much.

I also have a cool clock that illuminates the atomically correct time onto the ceiling, and alternates with the temperature.  This is handy in the middle of the night when I have to wake up and take a whiz; I can see how many more hours of sleep I can get, and how chilly my trip to the bathroom is going to be.  I've thought about artificially boosting the temperature for psychological purposes, but you can probably over-think these things.