here's to you, greyer days of March

before I met K I was an alarm person. Occasionally I would try to wake up to radio, with try being a kind term for sleep in late. So alarm it was, as hateful and harpish as they are. K likes to revel in half-asleep bed slumber for at least a half hour while "morning edition" (or "speaking of faith" or [insert NPR weekend show here]) plays along. This was a quiet struggle for us for quite a while but I can admit when I've been soundly defeated.

Here's the thing I've realized about waking up to the radio: you start timing your wakefulness to specific points in the broadcast, whether it's the news at the top of the hour or the Will Shortz word quiz on weekends. On Sundays, K and I are usually relatively awake by the time Mr. Shortz hits the air and we lie there mumbling out answers with half-lidded eyes.

Except for yesterday.

The clock re-set itself correctly (as I'm now aware and thankful it does) and the alarm radio went off just as it should, and I'm assuming Will Shortz tried to befuddle some chosen listener out there ("I'm a proud member of KMUZ!"), but neither K or I heard it. Body clocks will always trump digital clocks. Spring ahead and sleep an hour late. So it goes.

This was not particularly shocking, but this morning things didn't get any better. I knew we were in trouble when I heard the local NPR station switch over to BBC. We're late, I thought, though "late" is a relative term when you're a grad student with no classes. Finally getting up, getting ready and leaving, I noticed I was almost exactly one hour off my usual schedule. No improvement whatsoever. It occurs to me that I may be one hour off for the entire summer.