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thanateonly for some reason I had thought there were clocks involved somewhere. Oh well; perhaps it's just my father's penchant for using the line and changing it around to suit the occasion.
Once upon a time, when I was in high school, I was (for reasons that I don't believe I could quite explain, but that probably involved the joys of looking through mysterious piles of stuff to find out what was in them) assisting my brother to clean his room. Which is to say he was probably reading a book or something, and ignoring all the things I kept handing him to put away somewhere... And one of the things I found buried under his desk was an alarm clock, all done in colored plastic gears with a clear case so you can see them turning and stuff. Only there was a slight problem, in that the minute and hour hands had fallen off the rings that held them in place. They were still held on by the second hand, which was permanently affixed, but this mean that when I took the cover off and stuck the hands back down, I had no idea what time the clock thought it was.
So, um, I plugged it in, and turned the alarm on.
Hours later, after everyone had gone to bed (and I was asleep, with my door closed, at which point I get pretty good at ignoring stuff outside that doesn't affect me, so I don't remember any of this firsthand) the alarm went off. And my brother, who once slept through falling out of bed twice in one night, totally failed to wake up. My father, on the other end of the house, did wake up, and had to track down where the noise was coming from, which included turning on the light in my brother's room so he wouldn't trip over anything dangerous, and waking up my brother, who he optimistically thought would know what had been turned on and therefore how to turn it off. Oddly enough, I don't think it ever occurred to anyone else that I was in fact responsible for this. Obviously I mentioned it eventually, or I wouldn't have gotten the story, and at the point that everyone else was awake, it wasn't particularly anything to get annoyed about.
Oh, and of course, this was within maybe a week or two of the time that I would the loud-ticking little alarm clock on one of my parents' dressers and my father noticed it in the middle of the night and felt like it was a time-bomb hanging over his head or something because he was afraid someone had set the alarm part and didn't know when it was likely to go off. That, I continue to say, is not at all my fault. All I did was wind the clock, which is what one is *supposed* to do with clocks, right?
Years later, I did fix the alarm on the plastic one, too, by the simple expedient of setting it, and then moving the hands around until it went off, and re-setting the hands accordingly. Of course, I was probably also karmically repaid by the posessed alarm clock I tried to use in college that several times went off about two hours early when I set it to wake up at 5:30 to go off to fencing tournaments. I have no idea why it never seemed to occurr to me that I should throw it out and get a new one...
Also:
word for the day: Cambric tea. a tea-substitute, often used for small children, with water, milk, sweetener, and possibly a very small amount of actual tea. Or in other words, it's essentially the tea fixings without the tea part. With honey, it's a good thing to have while sick. The name comes from the translucent white color, similar to cambric fabric (very fine white linen or cotton from the town of Cambrai in northern France, as opposed to chambray, which is the same thing except with colored threads for the warp) a la the impossible shirt from Scarboro Fair. Except that time has moved on, and according to my dictionary, a seam requires thread to count. So I could staple together a cambric shirt and fulfil that particular condition. It wouldn't be a particularly *good* shirt, mind, but that's what you get for specifying no "fine needlework" anyway.
Of course, I put an herbal tea bag in my tea, so it's not exactly cambric anymore. But it tastes like mint and things, so that's ok too.
Once upon a time, when I was in high school, I was (for reasons that I don't believe I could quite explain, but that probably involved the joys of looking through mysterious piles of stuff to find out what was in them) assisting my brother to clean his room. Which is to say he was probably reading a book or something, and ignoring all the things I kept handing him to put away somewhere... And one of the things I found buried under his desk was an alarm clock, all done in colored plastic gears with a clear case so you can see them turning and stuff. Only there was a slight problem, in that the minute and hour hands had fallen off the rings that held them in place. They were still held on by the second hand, which was permanently affixed, but this mean that when I took the cover off and stuck the hands back down, I had no idea what time the clock thought it was.
So, um, I plugged it in, and turned the alarm on.
Hours later, after everyone had gone to bed (and I was asleep, with my door closed, at which point I get pretty good at ignoring stuff outside that doesn't affect me, so I don't remember any of this firsthand) the alarm went off. And my brother, who once slept through falling out of bed twice in one night, totally failed to wake up. My father, on the other end of the house, did wake up, and had to track down where the noise was coming from, which included turning on the light in my brother's room so he wouldn't trip over anything dangerous, and waking up my brother, who he optimistically thought would know what had been turned on and therefore how to turn it off. Oddly enough, I don't think it ever occurred to anyone else that I was in fact responsible for this. Obviously I mentioned it eventually, or I wouldn't have gotten the story, and at the point that everyone else was awake, it wasn't particularly anything to get annoyed about.
Oh, and of course, this was within maybe a week or two of the time that I would the loud-ticking little alarm clock on one of my parents' dressers and my father noticed it in the middle of the night and felt like it was a time-bomb hanging over his head or something because he was afraid someone had set the alarm part and didn't know when it was likely to go off. That, I continue to say, is not at all my fault. All I did was wind the clock, which is what one is *supposed* to do with clocks, right?
Years later, I did fix the alarm on the plastic one, too, by the simple expedient of setting it, and then moving the hands around until it went off, and re-setting the hands accordingly. Of course, I was probably also karmically repaid by the posessed alarm clock I tried to use in college that several times went off about two hours early when I set it to wake up at 5:30 to go off to fencing tournaments. I have no idea why it never seemed to occurr to me that I should throw it out and get a new one...
Also:
word for the day: Cambric tea. a tea-substitute, often used for small children, with water, milk, sweetener, and possibly a very small amount of actual tea. Or in other words, it's essentially the tea fixings without the tea part. With honey, it's a good thing to have while sick. The name comes from the translucent white color, similar to cambric fabric (very fine white linen or cotton from the town of Cambrai in northern France, as opposed to chambray, which is the same thing except with colored threads for the warp) a la the impossible shirt from Scarboro Fair. Except that time has moved on, and according to my dictionary, a seam requires thread to count. So I could staple together a cambric shirt and fulfil that particular condition. It wouldn't be a particularly *good* shirt, mind, but that's what you get for specifying no "fine needlework" anyway.
Of course, I put an herbal tea bag in my tea, so it's not exactly cambric anymore. But it tastes like mint and things, so that's ok too.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-07 12:30 am (UTC)