Happy Birthday to me!
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An inside joke in our house is that if I answer the phone and right after the “Hello” start discussing the weather, my wife knows my parents in Minnesota have called. Never mind the Caller ID and the fact I’m speaking English are also dead giveaways.
Of course in Minnesota the weather is a valid topic for conversation. It’s extreme! They’ve got bitter cold, sweltering heat, massive thunderstorms, killer blizzards, and (insert your own adjective here) tornados! If you’re not careful the weather can kill you! Drivers are advised to keep blankets and chocolate in their cars, since if they get stuck in the snow on a country road it could take a day or two or three before they can get out. My father was a highway engineer, responsible for keeping roads clear. He spent half his career watching the weather and planning accordingly. And in retirement, he hasn’t quite gotten out of the habit. 
If Minnesota weather is worth a conversation, Hamburg weather is worth at best a grunt. Maritime climate. 130 days of rain per year. Moderate temperatures. Regular seasons. Sometimes wind. Hmmph.
(There are sometimes exceptions, of course, like in 2010 when we had snow and ice on the ground for 3 months: January, February and December. Those months stick out like sore thumbs on our business statements. It’s not that it was so cold, but that the highway departments ran out of salt and couldn’t clear the roads. They should have called my father for advice.)
For instance, the past 3 weeks we’ve had rain and 4°C/40°F, broken up only by days with wind and rain. The damp cold seeps through your clothing and sticks to your skin. If you’re prone to depression due to seasonal affective disorder, this is not the place to be.
So when my parents call and tell me about the latest extreme phenomenon they are experiencing, they always ask politely how the weather is here. My answer is pretty much always the same. It’s still raining.
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We’ve gotten out of the habit of using alarm clocks. As a result, when I wake up I usually have no idea what the time is.
(No, this is not about how alarm clocks are obsolete in the 21st century and we use iPhones instead. iPhones as well as landline phones are banned from our bedroom. If you want to reach us in the middle of the night, you better bring the patience for us to hear the ringing from downstairs.)
It’s not that we don’t have an alarm clock in our bedroom. At last count we have four.
We have two matching digital alarms from that German coffee and gadget (and sports clothing and kitchen utensils and and and) shop Tchibo. On mine the buttons are very difficult so it goes unused. My wife’s is face down on the headboard. The clock is so bright that even at the lowest setting it casts the entire room in an eerie yellow glow. It’s like one of those pods from Matrix.
Number 3 is an iPod/iPhone speaker clock my wife gave me a couple of years ago. It somehow ended up on her side of the bed. It has way too many buttons and goes unused. Also, see above about iPhones being banned.
Number 4 is an analog radio-controlled clock from precision clock-maker Tchibo. It glows in the dark and shows the precise time. However, being analog, the alarm is not at all precise and can be set only at circa 10 minute intervals.
However, none of our collection of alarm clocks is particularly useful because from our bed we cannot see them. For one thing, our current bedroom furniture collection has no side tables but instead a headboard with wings, the surfaces of which are not visible from the pillows below. In addition, even if our eyes were equipped with periscope vision, we’re both at the age that we cannot see much of anything without corrective lenses. For the purpose of telling time at night, any alarm clock for us is useless.
So if we awake in the middle of the night and want to know the time, we need to reach for respective clock (for my wife, her face-down eerie yellow-glowing Matrix digital, for me my little round radio-controlled analog) and hold it close enough to our face for us to read it. By this time, we’re awake enough that we couldn’t go back to sleep anyway.
I haven’t yet even mentioned the most annoying alarm clock in the house… a TALKING clock from that electronic super-store Tchibo. I bought it on a whim, but found the voice so EVIL that I immediately intended to throw it out… but instead it ended up in our son’s room. He sleeps in a high bed with no shelf for a clock, so he puts it in his bed against the sideboard. When he rolls over in the night, he rolls against the buttons and suddenly the clock starts speaking: “THE TIME IS… TWO… FORTY-SEVEN!!!” Our son sleeps through it, but the rest of us have to put up with random squawks of clock logic until one of us goes downstairs and extracts the talking clock from his bed.
That we then know exactly what the time is in the night is no solace.
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