If you are like most of us, on Monday this week you woke up cursing  daylight savings time for stealing an hour of sleep from your life.  After staring incredulously at your alarm clock, you crawled reluctantly out of bed in the dark  and consoled yourself with a hot cup of coffee and a mental countdown to spring break.  
Of course not everyone is among the elite who enjoy the rewards of a random week off in the spring, but if you are a student or, like me, an extremely weary teacher, the prospect of this week tides you over like an unchecked Powerball ticket.
On a relaxing week off of work, the last thing you need to do is have any sort of knowledge of the time.  Let the hours and days blend together.  Sleep and eat whenever your want.  Don't even think about wearing your wristwatch.  This is the perfect time to wear jewelry with vintage watch faces!  They allow you to enjoy the beauty of a watch face without being hampered by the knowledge that you are eating breakfast at 5 in the afternoon.  This telephone dial vintage watch face eases any I-just-slept- for-13- hours-guilt while evoking images of film noir with Barbara Stanwyck lounging by the phone and classic moments such as this:
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)
Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), at their first meeting: "There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour."
Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray): "How fast was I going, officer?"
Stanwyck: "I'd say around 90."
Neff: "Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket."
Phyllis: "Suppose I let you off with a warning this time"
Neff: "Suppose it doesn't take."
Phyllis: "Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles."
Neff: "Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder."
Phyllis: "Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder."
Neff: "That tears it."

But if you are a college student plunging into spring break, you will need an entirely different kind of watch for your wrist!  When you are crushed in a throng of fellow partiers dancing at Pineapple Willy's in Panama Beach, how will you know what time it is?  How will you know if you are getting a text or phone call?  The answer lies in one high-tech, modern wrist watch.  It's a watch that looks like a bracelet, vibrates when you have a phone call and plays music from your iPod long after the band has stopped and the DJ has called it night.  In fact, you can even answer the phone from this watch!   

If you are a retro kind of girl sporting this state-of-the art bluetooth watch, you can offset your modern bling with a vintage watch face necklace or soothe your need for the past by acting out an I'm-just-like-David-Hasselhoff-talking-to-his-car moment the next time you chat on the phone via your watch.   

So let's move past our lost hour and look forward to losing time on our own terms this spring break.  Whether you are lounging around a pool or curled up with a Knight Rider marathon, you can relish your vacation secure in the knowledge that there is a watch perfect for the moment. But if perchance you do start to feel some wispy tendrils of boredom,  please spend your week figuring out why Michael is talking to KITT via his watch in this picture when KITT is clearly right there under his butt.

Right now, my 16 year old cat, Archimedes, is curled up on his much-worn Pillow Pet (also a cat)  dreaming about the sound of a can opener chiseling open some tuna on a lazy Sunday morning.  When he wakes up, he will stretch contentedly and wander over to my legs purring hopefully to be picked up and cuddled.  If he achieves this goal, his purrs will crank up a notch while he burrows his long-haired furry head into my hair and drools.
He does not know that somewhere in New Zealand a man is working as hard as he can to eliminate his feline brethren.  

"Your furry friend is actually a friendly neighborhood serial killer." claims Gareth Morgan on his website devoted to convincing the people of New Zealand that domestic cats kill native wildlife and must be stopped.  He expounds further with, "If we are serious about conservation, protecting and enhancing New Zealand’s native fauna, even supporting a predator free New Zealand, then we must overcome our denial and acknowledge that we are harboring a natural born killer." Morgan believes that cats should be "phased out" of people's lives and while he says you don't necessarily have to go and have your cat euthanized, he does state that it is an option. 

New Zealand is supposed to be the land of hobbits and Rhys Darby.  How can this whimsical place also be the home of Dr. Catvorkian?  To make matters worse, his website is filled with the "real" truth about cats ("Your cat is not innocent!) and why they should be eliminated, yet these supposedly vicious monsters are  consistently referred to in cuddle talk as "furry friends" and "little balls of fluff".  Poor Archimedes, if he could read, he would be so confused about his role in the world.  At least here in Oregon, he can curl back up on his Pillow Pet bed safe in the knowledge that he is a cherished, fuzzy, squeeze-cat and I fully expect him to wake the heck up and swiftly exterminate any rats that run across my living room.  

So what watch can capture the juxtaposition between sweet pet and deadly enemy of mice?  Well, perhaps Tom and Jerry summed it all up on the small screen and now live on to share their tale with this retro watch from Hannah-Barbera.

But if you really fancy cats and would like to combine that with your ability to tell time on a completely modern device, why not just download this Cat Clock app to your iPhone?

Phase that out, Gareth Morgan!

Everyone has enjoyed or endured a baby shower or two.  What's the difference between a memorable event and a monotonous barrage of baby booties?  Other than the obvious (how much you love the mother-to-be!), the answer lies in the games, the atmosphere and the gift opening protocols. 
 
1. Gift Opening.  The greatest potential for one to reach new depths of eye-glazing comes as the mother of the hour opens box after box of onesies, socks, and tiny outfits that sport exciting sayings like "Bundle of joy!" and "I'm cute, squeeze me!".   Yes, itty-bity shoes are adorable and furry sleep sacks do have a certain allure.  But the fact is that if there are 40 presents and each gift has 10 different articles of baby clothing in it, and every single item needs to be held up and gasped at for 5-10 seconds, that is 4000 seconds of ooohing and aaahing which can't help but get old.  SOLUTION.  Shake up the the old gift giving routines!  IDEAS.  1) Fill a pinata with all of the baby clothes and make the mother-to-be whack at it with a baseball bat until it breaks and showers her with goodies.  This has the added benefit of letting her get rid of any pent-up, irrational, pregnancy aggressions that she would otherwise have the foresight to keep contained.  2)Have an auction.  Mother-to-be can hold up different prizes and guests can bid on them with their baby gifts.  Person most longing to win yells something like, "I see your pacifiers and baby shampoo and raise you two hats that look like bears and a handmade blanket from the baby's great-great grandmother!" Then everyone oohs and ahhs for a decent yet minimal length of time. 3) Mystery words!  Before the shower, a list of words commonly spoken at a baby shower is created.  When a word from the list is said, everyone must stop the conversation while the mother opens a gift.  This can really help get you out of some awkward conversations with those people you barely know who invariably launch into graphic details about their own delivery experiences. When the dialogue starts to go south, just yell "mystery word!" and start clapping and chanting "Gift! Gift! Gift!" 4) Simple and elegant. The new mother opens the gifts quickly, expresses nice but not overly long gratitude for each gift as she displays it and then moves right along.  Guest do their share by not buying boring gifts.  Party planners do their share by not inviting  seven million people from the office who all bought the same three-pack of shirts from Babies R Us.

2. Games.  Oh, these can go so wrong.  And not necessarily in a boring way.  There is a fine line between a dull baby shower game (everyone rearranges the baby's name to make as many words as they can) and just plain disturbing (everyone sucks on an ice cube that was frozen with a tiny baby inside to see who can "birth" the baby in their mouth first).  Can you actually have fun shower games without having to eat melted candy bars out of diapers?  Of course! SOLUTION.  Think of an ACTUAL party game that people ACTUALLY like to play as a group and somehow give it a baby theme.  Examples: Pictionary! (Draw things related to babies.) Catch Phrase!  (Say things related to babies.) Charades! (Act like a baby.) Poker! (Box of diapers buy in.) Or, what the heck, just crack out some old college drinking games and give all the pregnant people some Martinellis.  The best side-effect of this tactic is that it renders all other problems moot because once everyone is drunk, they are sure to have a fine ol' time. SIDE NOTE TO HASBRO: Please make baby shower supplements to Catch Phrase so we can implement this idea with minimal effort.  Also please improve your electronic versions. They kind of suck.

3. Atmosphere. Time to hit the Dollar Tree!  At only a dollar per item, you can load up on pretty plates, table cloths, streamers, balloons and whatever else they happen to have at the moment to change any old living room into a party wonderland.  Keep it simple by nicely decorating a table that holds the cake and foods and then just drape some streamers and signs around.  Or spice it up with a theme! At a tropical paradise shower, you could set the mother-to-be up on a comfy lounge chair under a beach umbrella with a pineapple filled with faux pina colada in her hand.  Maybe an ice-sucking baby-birthing-in-mouth contest wouldn't be so off-putting when paired with Mai Tai.  Or exploit the obsessions of the mother by having a Hobbit themed party (Gollum can come out sucking a pacifier) or a Sex In the City themed shower (Everyone wears heels, sips Cosmos and eats fried chicken) or a Greatest American Hero themed party (Everyone sings "Believe it or not, I'm walking on air..." over and over again because that's all anyone really loves about that show anyway.) Just DON'T get crazy and baby theme your cake to look like this:

So now you are ready to create and enjoy your own wonderful baby shower!  There is just one more thing and that is... can a watch face sum up a great baby shower?  Of course it can, because there is a watch face for every occasion!  How about this 1995 vintage Swatch?

All of the babies on this watch face loved the creativity that went into their exciting baby showers!  Except maybe the baby at 1 o'clock.