![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ah, the joys of being an adult.
May. 3rd, 2021 12:29 pmFor some time now Kirsten and I have been discussing getting a new mattress for our bed. The old one had been around for a long time, and let's face it, supporting a woman of Kirsten's size meant it was never going to be back in good condition again.
The problem is the cost. We live on the ragged edge of the lower middle class. A new mattress would cost the equivalent of one month's rent on Offhand Manor (which is a one-bedroom apartment about 500 feet from heavily used railroad tracks.) This would be a major outlay, and the old mattress still did its job.
At this point, I must mention Buy Nothing, a group Kirsten has come to swear by. It is what it says on the tin, a place where you can offer up anything for free, and usually get a taker very quickly. As a fan of decluttering, I'm both overjoyed at how it gets stuff out of the place and appalled and how quickly it brings stuff in.
Saturday evening Kiri spotted a post on the site. someone very close to us was offering a nearly-new queen-sized mattress with a memory foam topper. She leaped on it. And we waited. Which became an issue. As This Saturday marked the beginning of Santa Clara's Annual Cleanup Campaign, also known as make your street look like Berlin 1945 week. We had a solid deadline of 0700 this morning, May 3rd, to get items to the curb. Late dumping can get you a hefty fine.
So we waited. Finally, last night at around 2000hrs, we finally heard back. We could pick up the new mattress in the morning. Which left us in a dilemma. We still had to sleep, and the futon is not good for the two of us to get a restful night's sleep. I set an alarm for 0600 (half an hour before my usual alarm) so we could wrestle the old mattress to the curb.
Kirsten took me to work for my first shift. As that ended, she picks me up and I covered up my police shirt (we're not supposed to run errands in uniform, people confuse us for sworn LEOs all the time) and we rolled over to the pick up location. Where a second wrestling match results in the mattress lodged into Darby's bed, and bungee down best we could. Luckily, we were able to take low-traffic side streets almost all the way back.
One more episode of Man v. Mattress and the thing is on the bed. Victory! We even made the bed. Mostly.
The problem is the cost. We live on the ragged edge of the lower middle class. A new mattress would cost the equivalent of one month's rent on Offhand Manor (which is a one-bedroom apartment about 500 feet from heavily used railroad tracks.) This would be a major outlay, and the old mattress still did its job.
At this point, I must mention Buy Nothing, a group Kirsten has come to swear by. It is what it says on the tin, a place where you can offer up anything for free, and usually get a taker very quickly. As a fan of decluttering, I'm both overjoyed at how it gets stuff out of the place and appalled and how quickly it brings stuff in.
Saturday evening Kiri spotted a post on the site. someone very close to us was offering a nearly-new queen-sized mattress with a memory foam topper. She leaped on it. And we waited. Which became an issue. As This Saturday marked the beginning of Santa Clara's Annual Cleanup Campaign, also known as make your street look like Berlin 1945 week. We had a solid deadline of 0700 this morning, May 3rd, to get items to the curb. Late dumping can get you a hefty fine.
So we waited. Finally, last night at around 2000hrs, we finally heard back. We could pick up the new mattress in the morning. Which left us in a dilemma. We still had to sleep, and the futon is not good for the two of us to get a restful night's sleep. I set an alarm for 0600 (half an hour before my usual alarm) so we could wrestle the old mattress to the curb.
Kirsten took me to work for my first shift. As that ended, she picks me up and I covered up my police shirt (we're not supposed to run errands in uniform, people confuse us for sworn LEOs all the time) and we rolled over to the pick up location. Where a second wrestling match results in the mattress lodged into Darby's bed, and bungee down best we could. Luckily, we were able to take low-traffic side streets almost all the way back.
One more episode of Man v. Mattress and the thing is on the bed. Victory! We even made the bed. Mostly.
