Eighteen minutes

Until last weekend, the clocks in Adam’s and my bedroom were eighteen minutes ahead. They had been that way for at least eight months.

The normal person might ask why they weren’t set to real time. I think that we always had them set a little fast because we wanted to trick ourselves into being early (or at least on time) to things.

However, last winter, we were without power for over three days because of a terrible windstorm. My clock, when it’s on battery back-up, has something like a 57 second minute which caused us to move forward in time. When the power came back on, having forgotten that my clock runs fast, we set Adam’s clock (which doesn't have a battery back-up mode) to mine and went about daily life.

The first couple days after the storm, I thought that I was taking shorter showers than usual. I’d get out of the shower in the bathroom just a couple minutes after I walked in the bathroom from the bedroom (and yes, if you’ve done the math, you realize that I take long showers (or at least, I did – before Addy)). But I soon got hip to the jive and realized something was amiss.

But for some reason we didn’t do anything about it. We simply adjusted our schedules. We would just subtract twenty from the time on the clocks. Of course, since the clocks were only eighteen minutes fast, this in fact set us behind in our dashes out the door (and sometimes two minutes can make a difference – yes, we sometimes run that closely…).

I think that our clocks bothered Adam a little more than he let on (though once he told me that he just never set his clock back one Fall – so it was off an hour for half a year until Spring sprung forward). Anyway, I say that maybe he was bothered more than I realized because last Sunday night when I asked “Could we set our clocks to real time?”, he was actually giddy as he agreed.

I don’t know why we didn’t change them earlier – I guess it became real time in a way. Once we got used to the time fast time, we would had to have re-adjusted the clocks by the difference exactly in order to know what time it was (and when I say 'we', I guess I now know that I mean 'I'). I don’t know if that makes any sense at all… probably not. It does in my head though.

But anyway, we’ve re-adjusted now. Or rather, we’re re-adjusting now. It’s still hard not to subtract twenty from the time… doing so, of course, could make us super late. Two minutes is nothing compared to twenty.

Ah well. I guess it just takes time. =)