guess who! A few days ago I received my Sleep by Number bed. I would love to have a plain old fashioned water bed but the weight wouldn’t go with the living environment – the weight would probably tip the coach on end, really screw up the jacks that I whined about tormented me for months and taking a road trip would mean draining the mattress, then I’d be sleeping on a plywood platform at night. In a comedy scene from a movie, I can picture me hitting the brakes and the filled mattress going through the glass closet doors, through the closet, breaking out the end of the fiberglass shell and slamming into the back window of the Steed on a road trip. Yes, I have an over active imagination and it runs in color with sound and all the digital experiences you can imagine.
No, I don’t want an air mattress. Camping experiences have taught me that isn’t my idea of a sleep solution.
Back to the Sleep by Number, it arrived UPS in two different boxes, the UPS guy was kind enough to set them inside the coach for me. I was excited about having the bed – I get to try it for 30 days to see how excited I really am about it – but there was also a lot to be done to get it ready to sleep on. First I had to pull a queen size serta pillow top out of my small bedroom. GAWD! It’s a good thing this granny is in pretty good shape and has all those wonderful genetics going on. The pillow top got slid on end position again the sofa in my front room and I started attacking the boxes and all the pieces that were wrapped in plastic with all those warnings. One of them should have read, “When frustrated with set-up, insert head in bag, tie around neck, breathe deeply.” Yah, I’m only kidding.
This particular bed is the ‘4000’ short queen model for RVs. One of the first things the instructions tell you is ‘find a drill and a saw’. UGH! We have plenty of tools here at the new digs between my own, my sis, and a pool of stuff in the storage shed. I had what I needed and started taking the screws out of the plywood that covers the bed frame (a flimsy wood box that has some storage underneath a lift up panel – controlled by a pneumatic hinge on each side). The bed frame has a smaller, back piece cover that is stationary and attaches with a long hinge to the lift-up cover. I had to undo all of it, including the hinged side to get into the back piece. Done deal.
I did my drilling and sawing – hell no I can’t saw a straight line. Who cares? It’s hidden anyway, up by the head of the bed with the wall of the slide being 12″ away.
The pump was placed, all the tubes, electrical cord, and control passed out through the hole. Screwing the top pieces and pneumatic hinges back in place took more time than I wanted and I had to brace the damn hinged lid on my head to hold it up as I reset the screws for the hinges. Houdini would have been nice to have around right then.
Following the instructions, I set up the bed cover, side/end wall frames, put the air bladders in their places, and plugged in the control unit. There was no ‘click-click’ as the instructions said there would be. KEE-RIST! Get out the flame retardant dictionary cause some words were burning in the air.
I unplugged it, tried it in several different plug-ins, in different locations in the room, flipped all the coach breakers off and on. NOTHING! The panel on the control didn’t light when all the buttons were pushed. Don’t panic, just get a big hammer and hit things, call support. I have to seriously wonder how much crap support listens to in a day, especially when it takes someone like me, that’s pissy anyway, 15 minutes to get through to support after being ran through the voice mail tree that makes you want to kill the person responsible for customer service management and correspondence/contact. SHE didn’t care that I was unhappy. I didn’t care that she didn’t care.
She said I would have to have the pump out where I could physically work with it in order for her to help me trouble shoot it. I asked her if she was aware of the procedure required to install it in an RV. Hell, do you think she even knows what an RV is? Of course she didn’t care – in retrospect I don’t blame her and none of it’s her fault. No, I didn’t swear. But I have an amazingly, sarcastic, acid tongue at times, and I was in rare form. End result? Get off the phone, take out all of the screws, after dragging the pieces of the almost completed bed off of the frame and wanting to get a knife and cut it into pieces, I pulled the pump out, plugged it in again as I picked up the phone to call support back – the damn control lit right up. *SCREAMERS*
It was a beautiful day. I had the windows open and had been patting myself on the back for how well the whole project was going. Time for coffee. I took about a 45 minute break and then went back to setting up the bed. By now I had been bent over, on my knees, arms and head holding up pieces of wood, hefting and lifting, my body was kind of crying…most of the stuff I was doing wasn’t normal activity and I could feel it. The last pieces of the bed went together. Ah-sooo, you think you one velly smaht cookie?
Shit, I was pretty much unexcited about it all right then.
The following day’s plan – how to get behemoth pillow top mattress on to the back of Steed for delivery into Vegas. Granny prevails! I wheeled the big metal wheelbarrow around to about 2 feet from the steps to the coach, yanked and tugged that awkward bitch to the patio tiles below, keeping it on end, I held it up, skipped down the stairs, and pushed it over onto the wheelbarrow. It laid there like a good kid. Wheeled it over to the end of the Steed and managed to push the end of it up onto the bumper of the Steed, go back to the other end and walk it up over my head until it was completely on end on the bumper and then push it over onto the bed of the truck. If the hitch (it has a cover on it and protects me or whatever comes in contact with the hitch from GREASE) hadn’t been in the middle of the bed, the whole mattress would have laid in the bottom of the bed, as it was, the end was pushed down to the bottom – at the head of the truck bed – and strapped down across the hitch to the back. Perfect. Time for coffee.
I was on my way to Vegas by 10 a.m. When I hit town, I picked up Darian and Riot. We went into mattress delivery mode, got that done and headed to GameStop where we traded in old games and got a new one for Riot for the Wii. Made my vehicle/home insurance office and got paperwork straightened out there, and then made Eyeglass World to find Riot’s new glasses. He’s so damn funny. He found a pair he wanted (2 for 1) and we told him he would get these too. “NO!” The salesclerk looked at us as if wondering what he was doing telling us NO. I laughed and said, “He’s spoiled. But we don’t mind.” The boy has a mind of his own and we can only thank ourselves for allowing him choices.
I was back home by 7 p.m. too tired to be alive. A shower, a short nap, and back to work. Articles to read and publish, emails to answer, and I played a PL Badugi tournament. It took for freaking ever because one player that had a huge chip stack had connection problems when we got down to two tables with 10 players (it’s played 8 handed). And he was dealt in every hand and allowed time to reconnect every hand. Fiddleshit! Even when we got down to three players, he was still in. Finally, heads-up, we went back and forth forever. The difference between 1st and 2nd was $16.00. We agreed to split that out – as the tournament had already gone about 4 hours and it should have ended at around 2 1/2 hours. We both just went all-in on a hand, I won. I shipped ‘jordanesque’ $10 instead of $8.
I still can’t do anything in Holdem, but damn I enjoy playing Badugi.
Sleep!!!!! That’s where I went. Go directly to sleep, do not pass GO, do not stay awake!