The Water Clock!

This is the most exciting gadget to enter our humble home in quite some time. Due to our convictions about consuming less, we have bought very few new things recently, and though our motives are pure, we still get a hankering for novelty. So we were kinda excited when we needed a new alarm clock (ours ceases to alarm us!). We have actually been doing OK without an alarm clock of the commercial variety thanks in great part to our dear children who consistently awaken us much sooner than we ever need to get up. However, the little darlings are actually being almost civil in sleeping until around 6:30am... OK, that only happened once so far... but we live in hope! As Cory needs to be up for work at around 5:30am, and since he has a new job that he does NOT want to be late for, we decided this was a good time to "splurge" on a new purchase. We wanted to stay within our mandate of buying environmentally and socially responsible items if at all possible, so I started to do my research to see if there is such a thing as an eco-alarm clock. Well, imagine my joy (no pun intended) when I discovered the "H2O Power" Multi-Function Alarm Clock! Yes, my friends, it runs on water! How SERIOUSLY cool is that??!! It actually comes with its own little AA shaped "battery" that you fill with water and slot into a regular-looking battery receptacle in the back of the clock. We were both a little skeptical as to its usefulness outside of a high-school science project, but it actually works!

And it just gets cooler... not only is it a regular clock with day, date, month and year displayed, but it also is an alarm, has a timer (for those 60 minute power-naps... yeah, right, like we've had one of those since college... as I said earlier, we live in hope!), and a thermometer. But get this: you don't press some button to switch between functions, you actually rotate the whole clock 90 degrees and it switches automatically! Who said loving the earth can't be fun?! Surely the water-clock proves that there's more to being eco-conscious than granola bars and hemp!