Tag Archives: alarm

Reflections on Friday and Becoming Old and Boring

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Today I have successfully fought off the urge to waste time on-line. It was my day to go to the shop. I arrived just before 9.00 after dropping Julia at work, and immediately had to ring the boss because the alarm was playing up. It is linked to his phone so I didn’t want him thinking he had burglars.

He came to the shop  later in the morning, with home-baked cakes from his wife and we had coffee with coconut and cherry buns. They were very good.

It does highlight a grey area – we are at work and we are able to sit down, chat, and have coffee and buns, but if we were a café instead of a coin shop we wouldn’t be able to do that because the coffee and buns would have to be takeaway or click and collect. I know the scale of the risk would be different but the underlying principle is there.

Same goes for talking to the neighbours. I’m hazy on detail, but I’m fairly sure I couldn’t go round for a chat, but as we needed to discuss building work it is allowable. Unfortunately, I found myself doing an impression of an old man droning on about how the street was 30 years ago. They are a nice, young couple, as I may have mentioned before, and have offered to paint the side of my wooden garage before they put their new one up.  It’s very kind of them, but does make me feel a bit old and decrepit. However, I did accept the offer – I may be old and decrepit but I’m not stupid enough to turn down an offer of help.

Julia made tea (egg fried rice and served it with some spring rolls left over from New Year. It was tasty and healthy and much better for us than the chips we would normally have had. We aren’t giving up chips, it’s just that the chip shop is broken. The fryer has broken down and they are temporarily closed. This must be a bit of a blow on top of the lockdown. I am glad, as I have said before, that I am now employed instead of self-employed.

Talking of which, we now have  a stock of CN 23 Customs Declaration forms.  Since Brexit the Post Office has tightened up on the use of customs declaration forms and we can no longer send items over £270 using a CN 22. Of course, we didn’t even have to use CN 22  forms for Europe until Brexit. At the moment I’m spending an average of 10 minutes a day messing with customs forms for Europe, which comes to an hour a week if we were working full time. Call it £500 a year.  The CN 23s require more time to complete.

I wonder how many other small businesses are finding this.

My anti-Brexit feelings are, at the moment, somewhat confused. I still think we would be better in than out, but I look at the mess that Europe has made of the Covid vaccinations. Maybe we are better out of it.

After work and fried rice it was quite some time until I could be bothered to switch the computer on – which is how I successfully avoided wasting time on-line. I just watched TV instead.

 

 

Time, Travel and Temporal Trickery

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A few days ago I noted that the time on my computer was wrong. This seems to have corrected itself.

I reset the clock at work last week because it seemed to have slowed down during lockdown. We though the battery might be running down but it has now been keeping good time for over a week.

Then, last night, when I tried to set the alarm, using my phone as I do these days (look at me being all 21st Century), I realised that the time was wrong. All the world time was wrong. And the calendar was reading 17th June 2017. To be honest, I could do with going back in time three years and sorting a few bits out, so I wasn’t too upset.

It would be just far enough back in time to make a few improvements, but not far enough back to involve reliving the bad bits, like adolescence.

Obviously it was too good to be true, and as nothing else seemed to have changed, I checked the time on Julia’s phone, set a timer instead of the alarm, and went to sleep.

In the morning, with daylight and glasses, I reset the time and all seems back to normal.

black and yellow analog clock

Photo by Stas Knop on Pexels.com

I have no idea why this happened, or why any of the previous incidents happened. May be clocks are joining in with the rest of the world in a widespread campaign to hate me.

It was my day off yesterday. Julia allowed me to drive her to the laundrette. It is the first time since lockdown. We have nice clean laundry and it smells good because it dried on the line. She has done some things by hand, so standards have been preserved, though I have mainly just aired, rotated and relied on my large stock of shirts and underwear which almost fit. There’s been a certain amount of breathing in as I got to the older stuff, but no disasters so far.

After lunch she allowed me to drive her to the gardens so she could check they were still OK. The grass is growing. We saw a greenfinch.

On the way back we saw two rows of traffic stop as they allowed a lady cyclist to retrieve her hat, which had been blown off. It was a comfort to see that manners still exist, though there was a bit of me that wondered why she didn’t have a string to hold it on.

Tomorrow I have a blood test, followed by dropping Julia off at work and then going to work myself. In the afternoon I will reverse the process (apart from the blood test).

If it wasn’t for the time travel I would lead a very dull life.

brass pocket watches

Photo by abdullah . on Pexels.com

 

 

A New Theory of Relativity

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This morning Julia’s alarm, as usual, went off shortly before mine. They are both on our telephones, which are presumably;y linked to an atomic clock somewhere,  so I’m at a loss to explain the difference. My car clock is set from my watch, which I keep two minutes fast,and it agrees with neither phone.

In the days before mobiles we had a time signal on the radio, and everyone seemed to take punctuality more seriously.

So, having had a disturbed night lay there waiting to fall asleep again. This half hour delay allows her to use the bathroom without feeling hassled and allows me to avoid making breakfast. This is either the mark of a caring husband, or a lazy sluggard. I have censored her actually words, but the last three letters are the same. In another example of relativity I prefer not to subject my readers  to profanity.

Anyway, back to the relativity of time. Normally I fall asleep for my extra half hour. Today I didn’t. It seemed to drag on forever. I started to wonder if I’d been in such a deep sleep that Julia had left without me. But no, When I checked my alarm the “hours” had passed in 23 minutes. The remaining seven minutes also dragged…

Normally I’d love an extra half hour in bed. This morning, mainly because we are resisting the use of heating, I decided to tough it out under the duvet as luxury turned into an endurance test.

And that, if I may be so bold, is my Theory of Very Ordinary Relativity. It’s not about things like time travel, or time moving slower at the tops of high buildings. If it was I’m sure that geriatric scientists would live in tower block, not bungalows.

It’s about very ordinary things, like not all time being of equal value and a week on holiday passing quicker than a week at work.

Unless (a) your wife starts worrying about whether she locked the door properly, or (b), you are spending it in Berwick-on- Tweed. But that is another story.