Of Delay Buttons And Other Technotools

There I was the other night in a dead sleep. It was about four in the morning to be exact(ish). I woke up suddenly. It's hard to sleep with the smell of fresh baked bread wafting up the stairs, under the doors and into your bedroom.

Sleepily, I realized that when I had set the bread maker "Delay" button to 6 hours, I miscalculated. The bread maker would not start at four(ish) in the morning. No, no no! That's when the cycle would end!

Sometimes being organized can backfire on you. I drifted in and out of sleep. My nostrils were like little snooze buttons. Every time I would go back to sleep, the snooze button would go off and I would come awake again. Sniffing the air. It smelled heavenly. But it was definitely not conducive to being in a somnolent state. After two hours of hitting the olfactory snooze button, it was time to get up. I am sure that my co-workers wondered why I was dragging myself around the next day.

It would be deceitful to tell you that this is the first time that I have made that mistake. Sadly, it's not.

I remember when I first got my slow cooker, I carefully read instructions to determine how long it would take to make a beef stew. I calculated the number of hours ahead I should start. In the middle of the night I woke up to a fully cooked meal, because I had misread four as twelve. I know there are cyber readers out there who are scratching their heads wondering how on earth I could read 4 as 12.

It's a special skill I have. A skill that sometimes wakes me up in the middle of the night. I don't suppose there would be a college course I could teach about this would there?