Watch This

Joann and I are in a bit of a spring cleaning mode.

I mean we're not messy people, she's a bit of a pack rat, Calvin can't get the food to his face, and I, apparently, can't seem to find the bowl with a single stream of pee, but all in all, our house is sanitary enough for small children and in-laws.

But there comes a time when you just have to start knocking a few things off your laundry list.

For instance, whenever Calvin gets a cold, our enitre kitchen island becomes a pharmacy of cough, cold, flu, and diphtheria remedies, both homeopathic and gentetically modified. All of which finds a home, for some reason, in a shoe box next to the wine rack.

Maybe just as a reminder that alcohol consumption while using some of these medications is awesome.

I got the idea yesterday that it could be just the time to find a place for our medicines in an actual medicine cabinet.

Of which we have two.

Not exactly one of those "Ah Ha!" moments you read about in the self help books, but I thought it was a pretty niftly little piece of actualization.

On the other side of the bed, Joann decidied it was time to get a battery for her watch.

Which made me think that I too have a watch that needs a battery.

A very pretty watch I got way back in 2005 to celebrate five years in the coffee business.

It's a nice silver affair with a teeny tiny company logo and the number five.

Which I absolutely never wore.

Not because I didn't like the thing, but because I'm the kind of person that might move a little to the left and get my watch caught on a tiny little piece of escalator, which in turn, would rip off the rest of my arm.

That, and it needed to be adjusted, and somewhere in 2008, it also needed a battery.

But as I said, it's a very pretty watch and I'm actually kind of proud of it.

I had gone years without even thinking about it and then one night on stage I realized how nice it would be to have a watch so I didn't have to keep looking at the bar tender and asking how much time I had left on my set. Not because I was bored, mind you, but because I am usually the opening act, and I like to make sure I'm off and out of the way in a timely manner.

It's just politeness.

And I like the fact that it has the number five as the only number on the face. I have a friend of a friend of a friend who is a pretty famous rock star and it took her five years of serious pavement pounding before getting off the ground, so not only does the watch remind me of some wonderful times of the past, it also says that I've got a lot of furture ahead before I even dare get discouraged.

Sometimes we need those kinds of things.

Anyway, Joann had to get her watch fixed and I made her take mine too.

And now I'm wearing a watch.

Which, goodness now that I think about it, is something I haven't worn since the spring of 1997. Any babies born during that year could legally drive now. Yet it seems odd to me, that I haven't worn one  because I actually like watches. Off the top of my head I could probably think of a ton of watches I've owned.

I had a bunch of those little plastic digital watches. Cause, you know, The 80's.

I had several Swatch Watches. (Google it)

I had a calculater watch. (Google that too)

I even went through this phase of wearing suit vests and a gold pocket watch.

That's right, I was Hipster before it was cool.

Then for Christmas 1996 I got a Mervin's gift card. (Go ahead and Google Mervin's too) And since it was Christmas and I had all the socks and jeans a twenty something fashion disaster could want, I used the card to buy myself a nice silver watch. Almost exactly like the one I'm wearing now except that I think it had a little button that made the face glow green. Which in the pre-iPhone 90's, was the only way to annoy people sitting next to you in a movie theater.

That watch was stolen out of a cubby hole at the theater I was working at while I was tearing apart some scenery. Again, even at twenty, I knew that me, jewlery, and power tools were not to be in the same room together.

But I was like super poor by then and never bothered to replace it.

Which was fine because for the next four years I was either building a stage or hamming it up on one and couldn't flash it anyway.

Then for the next thirteen years I was stationed behind an espresso machine, which is both the temperature of lava and would've caught a loose piece of jewlery like a great white going after barely legal bikini clad 70's chick.

But I haven't been behind an espresso machine in six months, so now I get to wear a watch.

A rather nifty watch.

And oh, look at that, its time to finish this post and do something else.