Tale of a Shooting Star…

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.

I am patiently (insert giggle here, if you find it appropriate) waiting for Terry to finish up his work. He is embroiled in a complex project right now and they are preparing to go live for Phase 1 of the project within the next few weeks. As a result, he huddles with his team in a small room all day, working studiously on their laptops with not much conversation and very few breaks (I don’t know that he has eaten anything today and it is 6 PM). Since they are right down the hall, I hear the occasional “woohoo!” as I just heard a minute ago, which is a good sign that they have gotten another piece of the puzzle working. Unfortunately, there is no time period to how long they will work any given night. You’d think I’d have learned to drive separate vehicles by now?? But no… so I sit here and catch up on your blogs because I have since lost the desire to continue with work after a particularly phrenetic day of my own. Last night we didn’t get home until after 8 PM, and that was with no stops on the way home except to pick up a pizza for which Terry had called ahead.

Tonight promises to not be much better, as we really need to go to Walmart. Which means that there will probably be no stitching for me tonight… AGAIN. *sigh* Nope. There’s the Walmart run, then dinner, then laundry, then crashing in front of the TV. I desperately need exercise because I’m starting to develop some very undesirable fat rolls around my midsection. Ugh. And my personal to do list just grows longer and longer, with little time to actually work on anything on it or do the stitching that I desperately need to relax. I’m wound up like a top that’s just itching to spin around until it crashes into a wall and explodes into a million pieces. ROFL.

Tomorrow morning, we have to get up earlier than normal to have the car into the dealership’s service department at 8:00 AM. No worries, it’s just to get some additional accessories installed that weren’t available when we first drove the car off the lot. We’ll pick it up at 5:30 PM, which means we HAVE to leave on time tomorrow night. YES! 😀 And I’ll drive home my silver bullet baby with new fog lights, bass speakers and compass auto day/night rearview mirror installed. Yay!

I have now received the signal that Terry’s ready to go. Though I still hear them in there babbling like a small group of turkeys. Hmmm… Terry’s allergic to turkey. LOL.

TOILET OUT OF ORDER. PLEASE USE FLOOR BELOW

In a Laundromat:
AUTOMATIC WASHING MACHINES: PLEASE REMOVE ALL YOUR CLOTHES WHEN THE LIGHT GOES OUT

In a London department store:
BARGAIN BASEMENT UPSTAIRS

In an office:
WOULD THE PERSON WHO TOOK THE STEP LADDER YESTERDAY PLEASE BRING IT BACK OR FURTHER STEPS WILL BE TAKEN

In an office:
AFTER TEA BREAK STAFF SHOULD EMPTY THE TEAPOT AND STAND UPSIDE DOWN ON THE DRAINING BOARD

Outside a secondhand shop:
WE EXCHANGE ANYTHING – BICYCLES, WASHING MACHINES, ETC. WHY NOT BRING YOUR WIFE ALONG AND GET A WONDERFUL BARGAIN?

Notice in health food shop window:
CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS

Spotted in a safari park:
ELEPHANTS PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CAR

Seen during a conference:
FOR ANYONE WHO HAS CHILDREN AND DOESN’T KNOW IT, THERE IS A DAY CARE ON THE 1ST FLOOR

Notice in a farmer’s field:
THE FARMER ALLOWS WALKERS TO CROSS THE FIELD FOR FREE, BUT THE BULL CHARGES.

Message on a leaflet:
IF YOU CANNOT READ, THIS LEAFLET WILL TELL YOU HOW TO GET LESSONS

On a repair shop door:
WE CAN REPAIR ANYTHING. (PLEASE KNOCK HARD ON THE DOOR – THE BELL DOESN’T WORK)