This qualifies as exciting, for me.

Today’s ramble hearkens back to a vow I made after one too many mornings waking up, clutching my heart and sweating, after being forced- one might say jerked wholesale- from my hitherto-peaceful repose, trembling gently; the agent of this change was, as per usual, the strident “BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK” of my green-glowing Sony alarm clock.

There were a few notable flaws in this clock. First, the switch to turn the alarm off required you to navigate past “Radio ON”. If you turned it on and off quickly, you’d just get a loud “SQURK” as you flicked the switch through three positions to Alarm On (or from Alarm On to Off). Second, the radio was… uh… terrible. Unless you wanted to wake up to static, it was Buzzer or Go Home. Third? The buzzer had no volume control- it was always set at max. BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK…

I swore a terrible vow this summer. “When I get a new job,” I said, “Part of my first paycheque is going into buying a clock that isn’t terrible. A clock with an iPod docking station! Yeah! I’ll have a clock that plays music to wake me up.”

Such a clock I now posess. It is a Memorex iWake Mi4004. In black. It fills several roles now:

1: It is an alarm clock. Dual alarms, in fact, which is… undeniably pleasant. One for work, one for Sundays- and to music, not strident banshee-esque wailing. I don’t need an alarm for my days off, as a rule; typically those are spent allowing my body to, in an almost sponge-like fashion, suck up as much rest as it wants by sleeping until I am awakened by some cut-off switch in my brain that thinks I have reached optimum voltage.

2: It is an iPod dock. This serves a dual purpose- it keeps the iPod charged and makes it easy to locate.

3: It is a set of speakers for the iPod! It even has a tiny little remote. Which I will, no doubt, lose within seconds.

4: It has a Sleep function. I can go to sleep to the sounds of twenty minutes’ measured ambient cricket noises, or perhaps a pre-measured samplet of an audiobook or podcast. (By setting the internal alarm on the iPod to play from a much more… energetic… playlist one minute before the clock alarm goes off, I can have the clock pick up something like the Wilhelm Tell overture instead of, say, the sound of a river running; when I’m tired, that’s not enough to force a twitch out of me, let alone consciousness).

In short: I have a new clock, and it is good.