Tale of a Shooting Star…

The bed arrived yesterday, thankfully in the morning while Terry was still home with me. We checked all of the parts and pieces and then he left for work. I stayed home again, pulling another one of my half-work-from-home, half-sick days. In my boredom, I started to set up the bed and got as far as having the air chambers installed and ready to fill when I happened to mention it to Terry and received a plaintive “What, without me?” in response, so I stopped. 🙂 The installation finished up fairly quickly once Terry came home. You fill the air chambers to a preset amount, then zip on the pillowtop, insert the foam, close the pillowtop and away you go! We had fun laying on the bed after we finished assembly and testing out different firmness settings. It was so nice that I didn’t want to get up and go downstairs for dinner afterwards! 😀

I think I slept well last night. I kinda passed out, so I don’t remember much, but it was nice. The bed was so soft, warm and cozy this morning that I didn’t want to get up! Soft, new sheets and blanket… oh yeah, and bed! 😆 It’s a little taller than the old mattress so Phoebe is a little wary of getting up and down, but she can make it. I think it may actually be a good thing because it means she’s not jumping on and off the bed all of the time like she sometimes tends to do at night. Terry will eventually build a little padded bench for her to use as a mid-way point for jumping so it’s not so hard on her little joints. But that will wait until we get the furniture into the room. Which will come later… step 2. 😉

It’s true. This whole bed saga has nearly seen its end.

We did manage to get to the Select Comfort store yesterday evening. The sales guy was young, friendly and knowledgable. We had spoken to him on the phone and he was very upfront about wanting us to come in so he could make a commission. After being in there, I realized that with online sales being so easy, he may not actually make much in commissions in a week, so I was happy to oblige. It’s not like I’m paying extra. In fact, thanks to him knowing about a sale that had just started yesterday (imagine our luck!), we saved $150 on the mattress! And because the store is in Delaware, which has no sales tax, I only paid tax on the bed because it’s shipping directly to our home in Pennsylvania.

So, we went, we tried a couple of different beds and then we bought the one we were planning on buying anyway (the 7000 series). However, it was really nice to feel the difference between the lower models and the thick pillowtop one that we went with. The Select Comfort beds have a very different feel than our Nautilus Sleep System bed did (in a good way). Oh, and the sales guy told us that the company that made our original bed went out of business, probably just a year or two after we bought ours. D’oh!

I have to say, if you’re thinking of getting away from an innerspring mattress and trying an air bed, Select Comfort is the way to go. These are just really nice beds. I would strongly urge you to find a store, if you can, and try them for yourself. You truly can’t appreciate it until you’re laying on one. I will never, ever buy an innerspring mattress again. And not just because Terry and I prefer different levels of firmness (though that’s a big factor, too), but you can just sink into these things without having your hips sticking up if your on your side or your rump pushing your lower back up when you’re on your back. Of course, if you prefer it to be firm, you can definitely get that, too. If you want it to be as hard as a rock, it will do hard as a rock. 😆 I mean, I thought our Nautilus bed was nice, but these just take the technology to a whole new level!

Yes, that’s my sales pitch. Just for the record, I do happen to have a vested interest, because if you give them my name as a referral, I get a $50 gift card. It would either be under my name or Terry’s name (Jennifer or Terrence Magee). So, if my words happen to spur anyone on to buying one of these beds, I would greatly appreciate it if you tell them I sent you. 😀 However, I would have given the same rave review, even if I wasn’t getting anything for referrals. Honest!

Anyway, back to the story. We went in, we tried them out and we bought a mattress (we already have the foundation from the Nautilus that will work just fine), plus a set of 420 thread count sheets from heaven, a mattress protector to keep the dust mites at bay (you really don’t want to know the things that live in your mattress), plus a Thinsulate blanket and matching comforter that even snap together for those REALLY cold nights. It didn’t hurt that all of the accessories were 25% off with the purchase of the bed. Talk about the only time I’d be willing to buy expensive sheets, comforter, etc. I’m a sucker for sales.

Fortunately, we finished and submitted our taxes right before we went out, so with any luck our refund will be posted to our account before the credit card statement hits so that we can pay it off immediately without me having to dip into my beloved ING savings account. And then we will promptly go out and spend the remainder of it on furniture for our bedroom. Yep, the entire refund is going into our bedroom. I hope we’re worth it! 😉 Ironically (?), depending on how fast the refund comes through, we might actually have the bedroom furniture before the bed! The refund will take 7 to 14 days and the bed will take up to 14 days to arrive.

BTW, my toe is much better, thank you. I unwrapped it yesterday and was able to jam it into my sneakers and walk fairly normally. Now I just need to get my calf muscle loosened up and I’ll be back to 100%. 🙂

Oh and Outi, the mishmashing shades of blue are slowly going away. The new sheets and blanket are in neutral colors. The only thing left is the blinds and I just don’t care enough to do anything about them at this point. 😆

Finally, for the record, the mold thing was totally creepy and in no way indicative of my housekeeping. I’m not the neatest person in the world (except when it comes to my stash), but I certainly don’t allow or encourage mold to run rampant in my home! I’m not a complete slob! 😀

I just wanted to make that clear…

Yes, dear readers, it’s true. Our Nautilus Sleep Systems bed is history. I took the bed apart last night so that I could put the air mattress on the base for us to sleep on until we figured out what to do and discovered the deciding factor. I first unzipped the pillowtop and as I folded it in half and proceeded to move it into the hallway, my hand found this wet spot in the middle where I had folded it. Yes, wet. Not damp, but soaking wet. Quite dismayed, I wondered what was going on, so I went back and looked at the air chambers which were now exposed and found some drops of wetness towards the middle. Now I’m REALLY starting to wonder what’s going on, so I unfold the pillow top and look at the back side that was against the air chambers. And I see two tiny spots of mold. Oh yes… ew. I called Terry up to take a look because, at this point, I am really flustered. We unzipped the pillow top itself and pulled apart the foam layers. The top layer is memory foam and is unaffected, except for where it has changed colors over the years due to the heat from two people sleeping on it every night. This is normal. Then we looked at the egg crate foam. The front side looked fine, but we looked at the back and found a larger, dispersed area of mold.

Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about the big splotches of green fuzzy mold that grow on top of the ham sandwich that you’ve left in the refrigerator for 3 weeks, I’m talking about the black mildew that forms in a damp area. In the middle of our pillowtop. Now, seriously, how did that happen? I think we will never know for sure. Terry’s best guess is that it stems from the time when we cleaned the pillowtop with the hand tool from our steam cleaner. But we let it air out afterwards and proceeded to sleep on it, so one would think that we would notice a wet spot?? We did add a waterproof, hypo-allergenic mattress cover into the mix, but I’m pretty sure that was some time after the cleaning.

The bottom line remains – we will not be sleeping on that mattress again. So, we’ll be shelling out a whopping $2500 sometime in the next couple of days for a new Queen sized Select Comfort 7000 series mattress. The technology has improved since we first bought ours and apparently, so has the price. We don’t do anything halfway, do we? It’s the next to the top of the line, but hey, I have problems with my hip, shoulders and neck, so I’m not going to skimp when it comes to something I spend 8 hours a day laying on. While I’m at it and because the mattress is 14″ thick and the sheets we have already didn’t really fit the old mattress that wasn’t quite so high, I’m going to break the bank and buy some of their 420 thread count sheets plus a new Thinsulate comforter with matching blanket. I may even throw in a set of the (much cheaper) flannel sheets. All in the blessedly neutral shades of champagne, ivory and natural (i.e. pretty much the same color and shade, just with different names per product), so no more clashing of the blue sheets that don’t even remotely match the blue carpet which doesn’t quite match the blue blinds which don’t quite match the blue wall color. 😆 My only uncertainty is around how off-white bedding is going to work against the white bedroom furniture I was planning on buying, but you know what? If we have company, which we never allow into the bedroom anyway, we can always throw the old blue patterned comforter over the new set, right?

There goes the tax refund. And we haven’t even managed to file yet! I guess we’ll be finishing that up tonight, after we get back from our trek to the local Select Comfort store. We’ll take the truck, just in case, but I don’t think all of the boxes will fit, even if they have one that we can walk away with. Otherwise, I’ll probably have to stay home some day to receive the 6 or so boxes that the bed will come in (we’ve done this before, remember?), which is okay since my calf muscle on the same side as my bad toe has decided to completely freeze up to the point where I can barely walk. Darn my body’s and my attempts to compensate for the toe injury! 😉

Okay, so it turns out it really wasn’t my fault, but I just about died last night when I was changing the fullness of my air chamber in the bed last night and I heard this awful, loud SNAP! Needless to say, after that, the pump system no longer worked. For either side. D’oh!

Terry ripped the pump unit out of the bed this morning, brought it downstairs and proclaimed, “It’s not sounding too good” as he shakes the pump unit and we hear this rattling of miscellaneous broken parts inside. Double d’oh! He unscrews it, pulls the fan section apart and finds that all 7 of the fan blades have indeed snapped off, one into two separate pieces, even. Now, honestly, if you’re going to put a 20 year warranty on a bed (we have the Nautilus Sleep System), who in their right mind would make the fan blades out of plastic? I mean, really… duh!

So, at this point, we seemingly have several options:

1. Say “screw it” and dump the old bed, sleeping in the spare bedroom until we get a new bed.
2. Say “screw it” and rip the now deflated and defective mattress off of our bed and put the smaller (full size) inflatable mattress onto our foundation until we get a new bed.
3. Glue the fan blades back onto the motor and cross our fingers that they stay intact long enough to reinflate the bed so that we can sleep on it long enough to get a new bed. (P.S. Saying “screw it” is implied.)
4. Follow above scenario and call customer service to get the pump unit replaced.
5. Say “to heck with it” and sleep on the floor. No new bed required.

Obviously, the last scenario is not actually going to happen. 😆 In the interest of saving money, we start with scenario number 4. We go out their website (notice that their domain name is “thebestbed.com” – we aren’t conceited or anything, are we – and find this lovely message. “We’re sorry, but the Nautilus® FitRest™ and Nautilus® Sleep Systems Mattress Series are no longer available for sale online. ” Uh-huh. Reading between the lines, I’m figuring that they are no longer selling the Nautilus Sleep Systems at all. And I might be correct. I call the lovely 800 number listed to speak with one of their “friendly, helpful and world class (according to their phone menu) customer service representatives and sit on hold for 20 minutes. At this point, we figure that there actually isn’t anyone answering the phones because it’s a weekend and they didn’t bother to have a message to that effect, so we leave a message for them to call us back. The aforementioned 20 year warranty will hopefully cover the pump, provided we can get in touch with customer service. I remain optimistic because we got good service from them before (though that was early on and we’ve had the bed for more than 5 years now). So, the plan for now is to hope that the fan holds long enough … oh, wait, Terry just plugged it in and fan blade pieces immediately flew EVERYWHERE!

So, we’ll be sleeping in another bed for a little while until we either get the fan replaced or another bed ordered. We’re probably looking at a couple of weeks. I’m not sure I like the spare bedroom enough to live in there for two weeks, so I think we’ll be putting the air mattress onto our frame. If all else fails, I’ll go out and buy a queen sized air mattress for $100 until we find a solution. A new Select Comfort mattress is going to cost us $2500, so I’m hoping not to have to buy one. I’d be a little irritated if we have to spend our tax refund on a new bed instead of bedroom furniture. 😕

In other news, I gave myself a serious attitude adjustment last night. Terry was working really late (good thing I opted to work from home yesterday, for that exact reason) and I was bored out of my mind. I was tired of working on my laptop and tired of watching TV, so I turned on the Playstation 2 and did a workout to DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) for 35 minutes or so. Still bored, I went upstairs, washed up and decided to take Terry’s truck and go out to the grocery store. At 9 PM, the grocery store is a fairly empty place, which was nice. I even went and had some prescriptions filled at the nearby CVS while I was at it. I returned home, sliced up the bread I had baked in the machine earlier (which created a really tiny, dense loaf of sourdough because the yeast apparently failed) and made some soup. Terry turned up around 10 PM. I was really pretty mad, but here’s where the attitude adjustment came into play. I figured I could lay into him as soon as he walked in the door about being so late, not giving me any updates, etc. And I could be mad the rest of the night and go to bed mad, making us both miserable. OR … I could be happy to see him, feed him and pamper him after a long day at work. There’s a huge chasm of difference between the two. One does neither one of us any good and the other embraces a loving attitude that helps us both. Guess which one I chose? 😀 And I am much happier for having made the right choice. I was able to treat him well and still express my displeasure over specific points that he could have controlled (i.e. the not calling me and letting me know how things were going from time to time) in a rational manner. I feel really good about how I handled it, considering how badly I could have easily let the situation become. Yay me! 😉

According to Terry, no. But the first knuckle on my left middle toe is decidedly purple and gives me a jolt of pain every time I bend it. Guess what? Just in walking, you flex that knuckle, so I did a lot of dragging my foot (literally) across the floor last night so that I wouldn’t pick up my foot and hurt myself. Terry taped the toe to a nearby buddy last night, which helped, but even having the bed covers on my feet made the toes bend. Ow! 😆

I am such a serious clutz. I swear. I have to make sure that every area I walk in is clear or I will run into something, even if I already know it’s there. I am forever stubbing my poor toes on everything in sight! Of course, it doesn’t help that I have very long toes. 🙂 Yesterday’s culprit was the box with the new 80-hour Tivo that just arrived via FedEx yesterday afternoon. BTW, for the record, I know it’s technicially spelled TiVo, but honestly I’m too lazy to capitalize the v. 😉

So, yes, that will be Terry’s toy to play with this weekend. I already renamed the one we currently have downstairs from “downstairs” to “master bedroom” as that is where it’s final destination will be. It’s only a 40-hour unit and the new one is an 80-hour unit. YAY! I don’t have to track my recordings so closely now. I’m always trying to clean it off and let me tell you, last weekend’s preview weekend on Starz when I recorded all of those movies was a complex little dance of knowing how many movies I was going to record and copying them off to Terry’s laptop as they were recorded so that we could clear them off and make enough room to record everything I wanted. We didn’t even watch half of what we recorded! They’ll probably get burned off to DVD and watched at some later date. We’ve decided that my older iMac, which no longer gets any use as it was a failed experiment in trying to switch platforms, will become the ultimate repository of all of the movies. And it has a superdrive so I can burn them to CD. That makes me feel a little better about that lovely little machine. It truly is a wonderful piece of hardware and OS X isn’t bad, I just couldn’t afford to buy new versions of my graphics and web design software to run on the iMac. *sigh* So there sits the ultimate graphics machine which most professional graphics designers seem to use and I can’t afford to make it worth the $1500 I paid for it a few years ago. It’s just such a crying shame. I would really like to rectify that someday, but by the time I do, the hardware will be out of date. Oh wait, it already is! 😉

Wow, my posts have been so negative lately. I’m really sorry about that. Unfortunately, my mood has been all over the map lately. After my really long cry the other week after my first psycholoogist visit, I felt really good. I actually felt happy and relaxed for a week or so, with no headaches, able to tackle work will little to no stress. It was WONDERFUL! If that’s what normal people feel like, then I definitely want to be normal! 😀 This week, however, has been a different story. After having that tanatalizing peek at what my life could feel like, I’m back to the normal, high anxiety, high stress me. I honestly wish I knew how to get back to that happy person because it felt SO good! If anyone happens to know that magical formula, I hope that you’ll be willing to share it with me…

You know what, though? This week will be another week and another chance to try to be relaxed. It’s a beautiful day outside, with gorgeous blue skies and lovely sunshine. The nights have been spectacularly clear this week. Everytime I went out at night, I would just stare up at all of the wonderful stars in the sky that were shining so clearly and so brightly. If the ground weren’t so cold, I could have thrown myself back onto the grass and stared at the sky for hours! So beautiful. 🙂

OK, I’m off to actually do some stitching now, since I haven’t managed to do any in what, a week?

Welllllllll… that lovely headache that I woke up with this morning turned into a migraine by the time I got to the neurologist. Appropriate? I would say so. 🙂 I walked in, sat down, pulled out my planner, snapped out the two pages (front and back) worth of headache logs for the past three weeks and handed them over. What can I say? You ask me to do something and I do it with a vengeance. 😉 While I had that absolutely wonderous nine-day stretch of no headaches last week, I have had one just about every day since. Blah! He did make the comment, though, that I rated the pain level of the recent headaches at 1 or 2 out of 10, which is not bad. He hasn’t given up on the Neurontin because he says it takes 3 to 4 weeks to take full effect and I’ve only been on the full dose for 2 weeks. He’s also going to increase the dosage by one pill a day. I’ll double up on the number of pills I take at night, so that any increased sedation I have as a side effect will go unnoticed since I’ll be asleep anyway! 🙂 I’ll be back in there in another 3 weeks for another followup. I made an appointment with my GP for Monday and an appointment to see a new OB/GYN in just a couple of weeks, as well, so I am going to be totally sick of seeing doctors! ROFL. But I hope that all of these appointments are really going to help me lick these headaches. Whatever it takes!

Back to this afternoon’s migraine, I’m feeling better now. I took a Maxalt and went to bed after the appointment, while Terry took Phoebe to the vet. Everyone loves her, so of course she was lavished with attention, as always. My prediction of her being 10 lbs with her winter coat was spot on – too funny! She still has the heart murmur that they detected last year. The vet this time rated it a 2 on a scale of 1 to 6 and they anticipate that it will get worse with age, so we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it in the years to come. Who does she think she is anyway? Me? (I have a heart murmur, as well.) The vet would like to have Phoebe get her teeth cleaned again, particularly to keep the bacteria under control with her murmur. However, she was amazed that Terry is able to clean her teeth every other night. Terry said that he didn’t even mention that she practically begs to have them cleaned (she thinks that the poultry-flavored toothpaste is a treat). Quirky dog. 😉 She’s now dragging a bit from the shot she received and she must be a bit sore because Terry was petting her and got quite a squeak out of her. Poor thing! I know how she feels. I’m tired, coming out of the Maxalt and I can already feel the headache coming back. I think we both need to go to bed. 🙂

Resting my hands/arms in the braces overnight has helped immensely. I no longer feel the pain in my right hand that I had last night. Great! Hopefully, I won’t overdo or redo whatever I did yesterday to cause that problem in the first place, so that I will be able to stitch tonight.

However, I must have slept funny last night because I woke up with a headache. *sigh* So, I took my morning dose of Neurontin, went to get in the shower and realized that I should probably try to nip the headache, so I took 2 Excedrin as well. While I was in the shower and washing my face, I noticed that the area in the hollow just below both cheekbones was a bit sore to the touch, so I took a dose of Dimetapp when I got out of the shower, as well.

Now, I feel pretty funky. My body is still sensitive to caffeine (which I find odd after all of these years of taking Excedrin), so I’m talking 90 miles a minute (I actually talked myself hoarse on the ride in to work) and my body feels “buzzed” from the caffeine and yet shaky and woozy from the Neurontin (and potentially the Dimetapp, as well), so I am really feeling strange right now. I think I need to make a custom smiley for that one… maybe one with spirals come out of the top of the head? 😉

Not sure I’ll have anything to report from the neurologist visit this afternoon, but if there is anything significant, I’ll let you know. And Phoebe’s vet visit is just the standard yearly DHPP shot and exam, so nothing to be concerned about. But thanks for the good wishes! She’s particularly soft and fluffy this season, so I’ll be sure to give her an extra snuggle before, during and after the vet visit.