wake up call

With both lads in elementary school this year, we decided to put an alarm clock (the one I used in my former life when it was just my enormous yellow Persian cat Baldwin the former starving stray and me) in the bedroom they share. The idea is to begin cultivating within the lads the sense of responsibility to get themselves up and going, rather than relying on us to do it for them -- or something like that.

I showed the elder lad (who can tell time pretty well) how to set both the actual time and the wake time on the alarm clock (see above about the whole cultivating responsibility thing). Off he went to make sure it worked after so long in cold storage.

The ol' alarm clock does indeed still work, as repeated tests in one- to two-minute increments show.  This surreal experience was not unlike enduring a prolonged test of the Emergency Broadcast System or what I would imagine the master alarm on a submarine or Space Shuttle would sound like.

Six days a week we are all up and at 'em, thanks to the time-tested little digital alarm clock with enough chutzpah to awaken an entire household.