Don't Back Down

Recently we moved my office from one end of the house (in the third bedroom) to the other end (in the old dining room). What happened to the dining room, you may ask? We moved it to the den. The den? Well, it really doesn't exist any more. We pulled up the carpet, put in a hardwood floor, painted, replaced the ceiling fan with a chandelier, and now it is our formal dining room. It's also a lot bigger than the old one, so we can put a leaf in our table and have more than 4 people dine comfortably at the same time at the same table.

We did away with the den because we figured that we had two rooms that we didn't really use - the formal dining room and the formal living room. That didn't make sense. Something like a third of the house and we didn't even use them, except on rare occasions. So we put a TV and a computer in the living room, and organized it a bit differently, and now we have a living room where we actually live. We've spent more time there in the last couple weeks than we have in the entire five-and-a-half years that I've lived in this house. Except when my bed was in there, perhaps. Or when Tigger lived there.

Anyway. Once the dining room was cleared up, I moved my office across the house, which in turn freed up another bedroom. And that bedroom allowed us to split up our two sons. Nathan kept the bunk beds in the room that they shared, and Matthew moved into the old office, which is now his very own room. And this leads to the post title. Bet you were wondering when I would get there, weren't you?

Matthew needed an alarm clock so that he could get up in the morning. Nathan kept the one in the other room, and let's face it, I am lazy and don't want to walk across the house every morning to get him up. So we went searching. Denise finally found this beauty (or one very much like it, with a model number of CKS1850) at Wal-Mart, for $5 cheaper.

The clock syncs the time (including date), and also keeps up with Daylight Saving Time automatically. Just plug it in. It comes with a lithium backup battery, which supposedly should last 3-5 years (no more 9-volts!). There are two alarms, each of which can wake to buzzer or radio - or you could set both for the same time and get both buzzer and radio. The display is a pleasing blue color, which has a high intensity or a dimmer one (you select with a switch).

It has a sleep function (for the radio) and a snooze function (for the alarm), and the coolest feature of all, which for some reason isn't mentioned anywhere on the packaging or even given much attention in the user's manual, is that each alarm has a mode where you can select when it is set.

You can set each alarm for weekdays only, weekends only, or all 7 days of the week. You could even use the dual alarms to set one for a particular time during the week and set the other for a different time on the weekends. My alarm, for instance, is set for all 7 days, while Denise's - grudgingly - is set for only weekdays. I had to fight to get her to agree to that much.

Oh, and why do we have one of these clocks? Because the first one was so cool that we went back and bought two more. Now we have one in each bedroom. We set the boys' alarms so they don't go off on the weekends at all, so we don't have to remember to turn them off or go groggily across the house at 6:10am. We set our alarms separately, and mine can go off on weekends and hers doesn't.

Perhaps best of all, there are no more questions about why the time is different in our bedroom than it is in the boys' room(s). They're all the same. Of course, if you're the type who sets your clocks fast on purpose, the whole automatic setting thing just won't work for you. And the time is still different in the kitchen than it is on the VCR or on the bedroom clock. Sorry. It's not perfect. Just really nice.