It's About Time

More than a dozen years ago, my sister-in-law took me to an enormous European store.  We were happily lost for quite a while before finally wandering out, our arms laden with fun doo-dads we hadn't known that we needed.  A few years later, we moved nearly a thousand miles, and found ourselves again near lose-yourself-in-happy-shop-ville.  Among other necessities I discovered, I purchased four clocks.  Like this.

I loved the simple design, the white-on-white coloring, the clean numbering... let's face it.  The clocks were cheap.  Dirt cheap.  I love that more than anything.  I had intended to put the four clocks up in one room, in a row, and label them.  Like London, Paris, Constantinople and Buchanan, Virginia.  (No offense to the quaint town of Buchanan.  I'm totally in love with rural Virginia, and I have Buchanan ancestors.  It's meant to be that I go there someday.)


I think I actually did hang the clocks up in the boys' room at one point, but then we moved and they got packed.  That happens a lot when you move 13 times in 10 years.  Since then, the clocks have been separated and hung wherever we needed to know the time - the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom.  Since moving into this house (umm... nearly three years ago), they haven't even been hung.  They've been resting tiredly on the mantle, drooping against the counter, or languishing in a box.

I finally collected all four of them, and decided that it was time to hang them like I'd originally intended.  I got out the tape measure and figured out how to space them evenly on the wall.  I found four little nails.  I even found the trusty old hammer my dad gave me when I went away to college.  I climbed up on a chair, ready to make holes in the wall.  And dropped the hammer.  On my foot.  I'm talented that way.

(I did eventually get the clocks hung, and I didn't even say any bad words.  Now if only I could find some batteries for them.)