The afternoon mystery parcel…

My day is usually crazy till around two in the afternoon. By then, my batteries need recharging.

By 2 pm, my mind slowly starts switching off, and my eyes start crossing, as words on my computer start blurring. That is when I head to take a power nap.

My power nap usually does not last more than thirty minutes, but if I do not get my quota for the day, meet me at your own risk.

Image courtesy – Cartoonstock.com

Immediately after my power nap, I have a nice strong cup of filter coffee; and I am then ready to take on the rest of the day, the children’s arrival from school, cooking, writing, household chores and the hundred other things that one needs to do!

However, in the last month, the schedule for my afternoon power naps has gone awry. The reason for it is quite simple.

Between 2 and 3 pm every afternoon, the door bell rings, and a mystery parcel arrives by courier. I sign and take the package, keep it on the side table, and try to go back to ‘power nap mode’.

But, if there are any afternoon-nappers around, you would all agree with me that if a power nap is interrupted, one can never go back to that zone again!

These mystery parcels are the result of my husband’s sudden interest in and realization of the ease and convenience of online shopping.

Sometimes, the mystery parcel is as small as a match box, sometimes it is big and fluffy. Being rudely awakened by the door bell on most afternoons as I am, I don’t even bother opening the packages. I leave them for when my husband gets back.

Yesterday afternoon, three different packages arrived. When my husband got back, I pointed them out to him and sighed, saying that it was a nuisance to receive so many packages.

He took two of the three parcels and asked me to open them. One was a connector cable for my laptop that I had said I needed, as the old one was not working properly.

The other package turned out to be a zoom lens of the clip-on variety for my smartphone to help me pursue my passion in flower photography! This second one was a surprise gift for me.

I think I may just have to train myself to push my power nap to later in the afternoon, when the gentle rustling of leaves, and the rhythmic call of the cuckoo bird will lull me to sleep; where I will dream of parcels that may hold more surprise gifts for me!!!

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The Inexorable Passage of Time

Call it what you may, but I have this compulsive urge to know the time at all hours of the day.  Our home has wall clocks and time pieces in every room, sometimes even two or three in a room.  These, of course, are in addition to the clocks on all the tablets, the smart phones and the set top boxes.

In addition to all these gently ‘tick-tocking’ clocks, our trip to Europe saw us bring back the famed ‘cuckoo-clock’.   As the initial excitement of watching the cuckoo peeping out of the little door to announce the time wore off, the cuckoo’s sounds became very important to me, to know what time it was, especially at night.

I have a special relationship with each clock in my house.  The one in the living room above the TV console has been set to run ten minutes ahead of actual time.  That’s the clock all of us follow for school, so we are ready by 8.00 a.m and then derive silly satisfaction from the fact that it is actually only 7.50 a.m. now. Somehow we’ve managed to cheat time and snatch back 10 whole minutes of our lives.

There is an old-fashioned clock in our kitchen that needs to be wound every morning; the clock’s comforting tick-tock in the kitchen accompanying me as I bustle about.

The most recent addition to our clock collection is a pyramid-shaped talking clock, which announces the time once every hour. This clock is positioned next to my bed, just for me, to know the time at night. I wonder sometimes if my sub-conscious mind ‘times’ even my dreams.

Tick tock…go these clocks, the silent witnesses to our lives.  They hold the keys to our everyday milestones – breakfast time, school-going time, yoga time, me-time, lunch time, family time…..and many more.

Then there are the races we run against the clock.  Running late, forgetting things, looking at the watch and the clock and the phone, and secretly hoping that the one that shows the slowest time is the accurate one.

And the times when ‘time‘ makes its presence strongly felt – as alarms!  Alarms for exams, for classes, for baking, and for reminders about events that need to be scheduled for later.

And every single time, it is about ‘time’, that companion who lives with us, watching us with silent eyes, as we rush about our lives, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes excited and sometimes crazy.

All is known to ‘time’.