NoodleDog

Ugh. Today is the sort of day you wish you could just go back to bed, except that would be even worse, because I have lost my pillow.

About two or three months ago (right after Christmas? Has it been that long?) I went to one of those Home stores with a friend. They had pillows on sale, with cute little strips of colour along the sides – green and pink (and I think blue, but I was only getting two, so I got green and pink). They were two for one!! Buy one, get one!! I couldn’t resist, because Rob likes to mangle his pillows. Seriously – he squashes them, doubles them over, twists them, and squashes them some more. He needed a new pillow, sort of, and they were there, and they matched, and well, I just gave in and got them. It made my shopping trip a successful hunt.

Except lo, did they suck. They were good at first, for, like, one night. And then it was all downhill. The stuffing flattened out, they had no bounce, and they were generally the worst pillows, ever. Rob went through his in about a week and a half, and I resurrected my old pillow that was stuffed with little flecks of foam, rather than polly-fill. People say those are cheaper, but those people are stupid. That pillow has lasted me forever. It’s probably all full of dust mites, sure, and it probably contains the last strain of scarlet fever known to man, since it was my mother’s before me, but fuck that noise. It holds its shape, it lasts, it’s even survived Rob’s pummeling night after night.

My pillow, me not being a sadist when it comes to those sorts of things, lasted a couple of months. Until recently. Recently, I had to go and get an old secondary pillow out of the basement to use because mine was just too flat to be of any good to anyone. And that was my stop-gap measure – a temporary work-around solution until I could get to the store to get a new pillow.

On Sunday, we ventured out to get a new pillow. We originally were going to go to Sears, but Sears doesn’t open until 11a, and we were out and about at 10:30a. We went to the Jysk store. Now, people will tell you the Jysk store is cheap, and sells not-that-great quality. To them, I say pooh. The Jysk store stuff is just as good as any stuff at Ikea, say, or at your regular department stores. It’s fine. I don’t want to have to pay $800 for a bedding set. So the Jysk is fine. We bought a bunch of stuff, and among the stuff was a new pillow for me.

I spent about seven minutes trying to figure out which pillow to get. A firm one? A medium one? There were really only two contenders, and a badly labeled third possibility. I selected the firm one, and away we went. This pillow, now, is a big pillow. It’s nice and long (although not a King-sized pillow – I could never see the sense in the King-sized pillows… Who needs a pillow that long? Your head would have to be huge!) and it has sides to it. Not the conventional top and bottom sides, which all pillows have, of course, but actual sides around between the top and bottom – a sort of level of cushion-y-ness.

You’d think this would be a good thing.

You would be very, very wrong. And you’d spend an entire sleepless night wishing you had gotten the medium firmness pillow instead.

This pillow was too high! This pillow was too firm! This pillow was not comfortable in any way, shape or form! This was a pillow for… well, someone else! The problem was that if I lied on my back, my head was propped up at such an angle that it forced my chin down into my chest. And when I went to lie on my side, my head was again forced up so that my ear was touching my shoulder. It was all around no-good. I took it out of the pillowcase, thinking that the pillowcase was forcing the pillow (which was large) to conform to such a constricted area, thus increasing its density. No. That helped only a little. The integral problems remained.

So I tossed and turned, all night. I woke up about every 20 minutes or in discomfort. It didn’t give me a crick in my neck, luckily, but was just uncomfortable enough that I couldn’t sleep.

You would also think that because I hadn’t put away either of the previously-discarded pillows, and because they were just on the floor beside the bed, I would have just picked up one of those and used it instead, but I didn’t. I suffered through an entire night.

I have to go back to the Jysk store this afternoon to replace the pillow with the medium-strength pillow. I need a sort of nook for my head, you know? My head is round enough (shut up) that it will roll, if not properly pocketed. When I was single, I used to sleep with two pillows on the bed, and my head resting just between them – so that the sides of my head were cradled by the sides of the pillows. It was glorious! I haven’t had a night’s sleep like that in… well, I can’t say how many days (I’m tired and I can’t count). Whenever Rob gets out of bed before me, or comes to bed afterwards, I try not to linger there, between the pillows, too long, but invariably, that’s when I get the best sleep.

We bought some of those ergonomic memory-foam pillows once. They worked alright for about four hours. And then, when you needed to turn over to your side, they failed miserably. You can’t build a pillow that does it all. You need two pillows, so your head can nestle between them when you’re on your back, and you can use either pillow when you’re on either side, sleeping peacefully. Gone are those days. And reminiscing about them only makes me sad, because I know I’ll never be able to sleep like that again! Let us never speak of this again.


Fearsome-Watch 2006: Fearsome continues to improve. This morning, he was downright friendly and cuddly. He’s gone from being a vicious, terrified wild creature to a house-cat in only two months. He likes it when I visit him before and after work, when we have a chance to play games. His claws are really too sharp for me to get into much with him, so I have to use a twig to skitter around on the bed. He’ll catch it and chew it to bits, and rolls on his back and claws it with his tiny feet… He’s great! And he has started to bump me on the head with his head, so I know he’s accepting me very well. Rob is still a little scary to him, but that’s partly because Rob moves really quickly around him, and Fearsome isn’t adjusted to us yet, and that just scares him.

I let the dogs into his room (sort of by accident) last night, and he didn’t freak out too much at all. He watched them from the bed, and that was it. He let Beau sniff him without running away, and I figure that’s about as good as I can expect, at this point. I’ve taken him into the living room once, and the hallway a couple of times, and the bathroom – we’re expanding his territory very slowly. I figure that’s the right way to do it because he needs to feel as comfortable as possible in our house, especially with the dogs running around. Caspar occasionally bops him on the head, still, whether that’s in play or as a sign that he’s the boss – Fearsome doesn’t appreciate it and usually runs under the bed whenever he does it.

I’m going to attempt to clip his claws this afternoon/evening sometime. I have to get him to relax enough in my arms that I can manipulate the tip of his claw out of his paw to snip it with the nail clippers. You don’t need to de-claw cats – clipping their claws is usually not that big a deal. Of course, I’ve never tried to clip a wild cat’s claws before, but the other cats all let me do it. Smudge grumbles and complains, but she still lets me get most of hers before she wriggles away. Caspar is pretty easy to clip since he’s so laid-back. Tobey, well, poor Tobey has no claws since the people before me had him declawed. He’s alright, but occasionally, he paws the edges of the sofa in a little mad frenzy, as though to say “DAMMIT, these don’t work…”.


We got our Suburban this weekend. Yay! This is a huge purchase for us – the largest joint purchase so far, in terms of actual cash-outlay. Of course, there’s the trailer, which is a lot more money, but it’s over a longer term and smaller payments. The Suburban is a fantastic car. I refuse to call it a truck. It’s enclosed. It’s a car. Sure, it’s the biggest car out there, by far, but it’s still a car. It’s like a wagon, really. Only huge. It’s actually the biggest thing out there – only the Hummer is slightly wider. You really feel powerful driving around in it. Like “get out of my way” powerful. Like “oh, you silly little Acura, you are tiny and ineffectual” powerful. Heh.

As it turns out, the Suburban is fully-loaded with all available options (except one that Rob said something about but I wasn’t listening). It is also the Suburban you get if you want to tow stuff. It has the “big” engine, and the tow package and stuff. Only my friend’s parents never towed anything with it at all. So this was not just a good deal, it was exactly what we need, and almost like getting a new vehicle because of the no-previous-towing thing. The dogs have a huge space at the back, and there’s still a row of seating between us and them. I’m hoping that Cooter will finally calm the hell down about riding in the back now – he just hates it when anyone touches his feet. Well, now he can lie all stretched-out and no one has to touch his feet (except he’ll probably curl up and still grumble when anyone walks by him…).

I have a Board meeting tonight. The night Prison Break returns to the airwaves. It’s very disappointing, and I need the networks to start putting out the schedule at least a month in advance, with notification to me so I can schedule my meetings around them better. I do not want to be having a meeting when the finale is on. Nor when the finale of stupid Lost is on. In fact, I just don’t want to have any more meetings, period. I have started applying for other jobs left, right and center. It’s not the money, because I get enough money (although if there’s more out there, I can’t see the harm in making more…). It’s not the flexibility, because I can’t beat the flexibility here – I can come and go whenever I want, and no one cares at all. It’s the fact that this job gets harder and harder, and I get no more money, and I get only two weeks’ vacation, and the people are dumber and dumber to deal with, and really, I’ve just had it with the evening meetings. Meet on your own time, if you want. If you need me, e-mail me whatever you want. Call me up, conference-style, for fifteen minutes. If you want to meet with me, though, do it during working hours. I just can’t handle this evening meeting stuff any more. That’s MY time! That’s Fearsome’s time! That’s Prison Break time! That’s dinner time! That’s sleeping time!!

Wah.

If anyone out there has a six-hour-per-day job they want to give me, and want to pay me a bunch of money to do easy stuff during that six hours per day, you let me know. The Comments section is open.