Night One – How many ways can an Alarm Clock wake you up?

Why is John posting a picture of an alarm clock? To fully appreciate this alarm clock, you need a few pieces of background information.

Fact #1 there is a two hour time difference between our home in North Carolina and Phoenix. So after we finished a leisurely dinner at Old Town Tortilla Factory in Scottsdale, and after we walked Scottsdale’s famous ArtWalk up and down both sides of five blocks visiting multiple galleries along the way, we returned to our Airbnb apartment exhausted and quite late by North Carolina time zone standards.

Fact #2 the air in Arizona is very dry, especially for folks who come from the land of 80% humidity.

Fact #3 Betty breathes through her mouth when she sleeps so she is prone to waking throughout the night with an uncomfortably dry mouth. Consequently, she sleeps with a stainless steel water bottle at her bedside to quench her thirst in the middle of the night.

So on our first night in strange accommodations in an unusually dry climate I am awakened from a dead, sound sleep by a soft “clink, clink, clink” coming from Betty side of the bed. I listen. Perplexed. I think to myself, “Did Betty get hungry in the middle of the night? Is she eating a brownie off of a plate with a fork? What is that clinking sound? Wha . . .?”

To staunch my confusion (so I can stop thinking about it and get back to sleep) I ask, “What are you doing?” I wait. I get no answer. The clinking noises continue.

I ask again, louder now, “What are you doing? Are you eating in bed?” Groggily, with a tinge of irritation, she replies, “Nothing.”

The clinking noises continue.

Now I’m really baffled. Even louder, “Betty, what are you doing? What is that noise? Are you eating in bed?”

Finally, she mumbles an icily irritated response. “Don’t worry about it! Just go back to sleep!” The clinking noises stop. She quickly settles back into rhythmic breathing – sounds that I recognize as her sleeping sounds. I take her advice. I stop worrying about the mysterious clinking sounds and I, too, go back to sleep.

Morning arrives. After we have had our initial blast of coffee – as we settle in to our breakfast at Harlow’s Cafe – I cautiously ask, “What was that noise last night?”

Betty responds, “You don’t want to know.” The look on my face tells her that I will not be so easily put off. “Well, I get dry in the night. So I reached for my water bottle. I couldn’t get any water out of it so I kept pulling on the lid with my teeth. When you kept bugging me I finally woke up enough to realize that I was sucking on the alarm clock rather than my water bottle. I’d rather not talk about it.”

Thus the picture of Betty’s uncompromisingly dry alarm clock. I wish I’d had camera in hand in the middle of the night.