Wait -- bed?
People have been looking at me blankly over this, so here's the situation:
For the past fourteen years, roughly, I've been sleeping on a couch. It's a very good couch, about eight feet long, red and fuzzy, and before it was subjected to over a decade of heavy-duty use -- and it wasn't a new couch at the start of that period; this is the old Stewart family couch, and is definitely older than I am, and arguably older than my mother -- it was even a very good thing to sleep on. But it's old, and it has a bend in the middle, and it offers really no support at all, and as I was flailing around, looking for things that would make my back hurt less, it occured to me that, perhaps, I should start sleeping on a bed.
I didn't want to do this, so I asked my doctor and my chiropractor. When I got to the statement 'I've been sleeping on a couch for fourteen years', well...
I didn't know doctors were allowed to use those words.
I called Kate and informed her that I needed to obtain a new bed. Kate, being the utterly practical being that she sometimes is, told me that I wasn't to buy an Ikea mattress, and assured me that the places that sell the good beds also provide financing to allow mere mortals to afford the good beds. We made plans to go out and do some shopping, and Monday morning, she picked me up to go to Sleep Train.
Sleep Train was a ghost town. It being the day before a major US holiday, not many people were in town to, y'know, make major furniture purchases. This was a Good Thing, as it allowed us to pretty much poke, prod, and flop on the beds with impunity, and even garnered us our very own sales rep, who followed us around but didn't hard sell at all. We settled on a reasonably high-end Sealy, which was soft enough not to make me psycho, but hard enough to offer lumbar support.
After filling out a lot of paperwork, I qualified for financing, and we arranged to have the bed delivered to my place. I went off with Kate, and we obtained sheets and a light-weight summer blanket. Life was good.
Flash forward to the evening, where Kate and I -- now bolstered by Chris and my mother -- descended upon my unsuspecting room. Thanks to my back, I got to be utterly unhelpful as we went through the process of cleaning off the floor, removing everything from the hallway, shoving my couch out of my bedroom into the spare room (it'll go from there to the back yard; we may have a ceremonial burning or something). The three of them then assembled my bed, which proved to be remarkably tall -- like, the lamp that used to be a 'sit up to reach it' is now 'reach straight across'. It's very surreal.
Kate and Chris then went outside to allow Kate to have a cigarette, leaving my mother and I alone in the room. It really shouldn't be much of a surprise that when they came back inside, fifteen minutes later, she and I had managed to rearrange half of the remaining furniture, moving the snake cage to the wall with the bed, under the window, and the shelves that had previously been there out against the wall where the snake cage had been. This is a much better use of space; my room actually looks like it's gotten bigger.
So now I have a bed. It has orange and green sheets, and (currently) a green blanket and an assortment of orange and green afghans on it; it has caused me to realize that I need more shelves, and has improved the overall layout of my room immensely. It'll be a few weeks before I know whether it's helping my back, but I'm sleeping okay, and Lilly likes the new bed.
Life is good.
For the past fourteen years, roughly, I've been sleeping on a couch. It's a very good couch, about eight feet long, red and fuzzy, and before it was subjected to over a decade of heavy-duty use -- and it wasn't a new couch at the start of that period; this is the old Stewart family couch, and is definitely older than I am, and arguably older than my mother -- it was even a very good thing to sleep on. But it's old, and it has a bend in the middle, and it offers really no support at all, and as I was flailing around, looking for things that would make my back hurt less, it occured to me that, perhaps, I should start sleeping on a bed.
I didn't want to do this, so I asked my doctor and my chiropractor. When I got to the statement 'I've been sleeping on a couch for fourteen years', well...
I didn't know doctors were allowed to use those words.
I called Kate and informed her that I needed to obtain a new bed. Kate, being the utterly practical being that she sometimes is, told me that I wasn't to buy an Ikea mattress, and assured me that the places that sell the good beds also provide financing to allow mere mortals to afford the good beds. We made plans to go out and do some shopping, and Monday morning, she picked me up to go to Sleep Train.
Sleep Train was a ghost town. It being the day before a major US holiday, not many people were in town to, y'know, make major furniture purchases. This was a Good Thing, as it allowed us to pretty much poke, prod, and flop on the beds with impunity, and even garnered us our very own sales rep, who followed us around but didn't hard sell at all. We settled on a reasonably high-end Sealy, which was soft enough not to make me psycho, but hard enough to offer lumbar support.
After filling out a lot of paperwork, I qualified for financing, and we arranged to have the bed delivered to my place. I went off with Kate, and we obtained sheets and a light-weight summer blanket. Life was good.
Flash forward to the evening, where Kate and I -- now bolstered by Chris and my mother -- descended upon my unsuspecting room. Thanks to my back, I got to be utterly unhelpful as we went through the process of cleaning off the floor, removing everything from the hallway, shoving my couch out of my bedroom into the spare room (it'll go from there to the back yard; we may have a ceremonial burning or something). The three of them then assembled my bed, which proved to be remarkably tall -- like, the lamp that used to be a 'sit up to reach it' is now 'reach straight across'. It's very surreal.
Kate and Chris then went outside to allow Kate to have a cigarette, leaving my mother and I alone in the room. It really shouldn't be much of a surprise that when they came back inside, fifteen minutes later, she and I had managed to rearrange half of the remaining furniture, moving the snake cage to the wall with the bed, under the window, and the shelves that had previously been there out against the wall where the snake cage had been. This is a much better use of space; my room actually looks like it's gotten bigger.
So now I have a bed. It has orange and green sheets, and (currently) a green blanket and an assortment of orange and green afghans on it; it has caused me to realize that I need more shelves, and has improved the overall layout of my room immensely. It'll be a few weeks before I know whether it's helping my back, but I'm sleeping okay, and Lilly likes the new bed.
Life is good.