Ten Minutes

     Last night as I laid in bed I could hear the wind blowing outside.  I could feel the cold air coming in through the cracks of my window and I could see the moon shining brightly above the trees.  I was grateful for my shelter, happy to be tucked inside a warm bed and glad I wasn’t outside where it was 3 degrees below zero with winds gusting up to 15 miles per hour.  Maybe that was why I slept so peacefully until I rolled over and looked at the alarm clock.

<%image(20061207-snowcanoesm.jpg|250|167|Morning on the Gunflint Trail)%>

     "Why is it 6:30 AM?"  (I asked this question out loud as I tried to figure out what was going on and why the alarm hadn’t gone off.  The alarm is usually set for 5:30 AM so I have time to get the kids out to the bus stop by 6:30 AM.)

     "Mike, get up and get Josh ready, we gotta go now!"  I sprang out of bed, yelled downstairs to Abby to just get dressed and get in the car as I rushed around the room pulling on clothes and shoes.

    Mike was a bit dazed as he went downstairs saying, "You’re going to try and make the bus?  Oh yeah, your clock is ten minutes fast."

     Ten minutes later, real time 6:30 AM, I was handing out trail mix for breakfast and Trident for tooth brushing to the kids on the bus.  I was amazed at how quickly and smoothly the kids got ready and how it didn’t even seem to phase them.

     As I crawled back into my warm bed I said to Mike, "That was easy, why don’t we do that every morning?"

The reason the alarm clock didn’t go off was because of a power outage yesterday afternoon.  Mike reset the time on the clock and I reset the alarm on the clock.  I didn’t pay attention to a small detail when I was setting the alarm.  It turns out the clock said it was AM and when I set the alarm I just set it to the opposite of what the time was, which meant my alarm was set for PM.  I imagine the alarm would have gone off around 5:30 this afternoon if I hadn’t noticed!