E 5 L .........

This is one of those stories I really shouldn't tell about myself. I shouldn't even have told Hubby. I should just keep it inside, relieved to know that no one else witnessed my stupidity. But no.

In a show of supreme self-confidence, to demonstrate just how high my self-esteem is, to acknowledge in a very public way that my three college degrees sometimes appear to have been wasted time and money, I have to tell you the mistake I made yesterday morning.

First a little background.

Our new bedroom suit (you know, the one that caused us to have to make $10,000 renovations on our house and it's now a two-bedroom instead of a three-? Yeah, that one) has a HUGE headboard/bookcase/mirror combination (it even has a compartment for WINE, for Pete's sake). It makes it impossible to sit up in bed and read, but that's beside the point. There is an open section (for books, I presume) right behind our pillows, and this is where Gus has decided he likes to sleep. He goes to sleep on the end of the bed, but after everyone has sufficiently settled down for the night, he makes his way to the headboard and proceeds to make a lot of noise carving himself out a place to lie down. Sometimes I think the carving is literal.

Night before last, sometime in the middle of the night, Gus managed to pull the clock off the shelf above his lair. I put it back on its shelf and went back to sleep.

When I was getting ready for my bike ride yesterday, I walked in the bedroom and looked at the clock. It had a very strange error message on it.

E 5 L.

E 5 L? What the hell is THAT?

That damn dog. He's broken my clock. And I really LIKED that clock. It has a wonderful feature on it whereby you can silence the alarm but not turn it off. Therefore you don't have to remember to turn it back on every day. (What you DO have to remember is to turn it OFF for the weekend. Only takes a couple of 5:00 AM Saturday wake-ups to get in THAT habit.) I guess you could consider it a 24-hour snooze button. The button even has a little indention in it, so you can feel whether or not you're on the right button. Just in case your dog has a habit of moving the clock in the night.

E 5 L. My poor clock.

I wondered what kind of error message that could be and whether or not it could be fixed. I become attached to things, and I have had this little clock for several years. I know I can get a new one relatively inexpensively, but I have a RELATIONSHIP with that clock. I want THAT one.

But now it's E 5 L.

Those of you who are smarter than I (which is possibly every single person reading this post) have probably already figured out my mistake.

E 5 L isn't an error message.

It's what a digital clock reads at 7:53. If the clock is upside-down.