Sic Transit Sleep Country

The blinds, door trim and light fixture inside the closet still have to to go up. The pictures still need to go back on the walls. I still have to arrange for a free consultation with California Closets (or, possibly, Simply Closets), but we have the wrapper off the new light fixture and the bed is back where it belongs, and not in pieces scattered throughout the house.

The bed is also sporting a new mattress that we got from Sleep Country Canada (I apologize for triggering an ear worm).

The last time we went to Sleep Country has got to be at least fifteen years ago. We still have the bed. It's in our guest bedroom. It's what I slept on during my convalescence and it's what we've both been sleeping on while we've been renovating. The frame has always been a piece of crap, but the mattress, a Sealy, is still good.

I recall several things about that first Sleep Country experience. One was the sales guy, just brimming with bed-related information, who talked to us for what seemed like forever before steering us toward the test beds. Another was, at a bit more than two grand, the box spring, mattress and frame constituted the single largest furniture purchase we had made to that date. The price was so big, in fact, that the next time we bought a bed, we went to IKEA because we did not want to spend that much again.

Because the world's a funny place, the IKEA bed frame was a pretty good piece of furniture but the foam mattress was crappy. I wanted to get a new bed after the renovation, or at least a new mattress. A new Sleep Country location opened up on Bay Street just south of Queen's Park where I work, and it felt like all the stars were aligning.

Last Saturday Bruce and I stopped in at that Sleep Country, got nothing like the detailed sales pitch we had before, but did discuss the old bed at length - clearly stating several times that it was an IKEA foam mattress - and picked a mattress that I am sure I will love as much as the Sealy, if not more.

The other thing I love about Sleep Country is that they'll take away your old mattress. The IKEA foam pad is currently wedged up against the wall in our guest bedroom. It's not a pretty sight. I was looking forward to it being gone.

The sales rep for our second Sleep Country bed happily added the fifteen dollar fee for the mattress removal to our total bill and said the new mattress would be delivered Friday.

Two nice young men showed up at our door last night with our new mattress and hardly trashed the place at all as they brought it in. When Bruce showed them the old mattress to take away, they said, "we don't take IKEA foam mattresses."

After some discussion, they pointed to the information on the brochure that the sales rep handed to us after we had completed our transaction. There it stated that Sleep Country would not take uncovered foam mattresses.

The nice young men assured us that once we took the trouble to complain to Sleep Country, our fifteen dollars would be reimbursed. 

I just hope I never need another bed, because I'm never going to either IKEA or Sleep Country again.

 
Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Progress

There's still dust everywhere (hence the vacuum cleaner)
but we're very close to finished with the renovation.
Congratulations to the two readers who saw that
we changed the way the ensuite door swings.

Today is Saturday, November 19, three months plus two days since my surgery.

Here's the progress to date:

• I no longer walk with a cane and am far past the adolescent ostrich stage; I'm walking like a fifty-something human again
• I am almost out of pain - I'm down to two Tylenol a day 
• I'm not 100% - I still have a bit of a wobble in my gait; without the cane my stride is shorter, my speed less - but with a bit more work and the magical influence of time, I think I will be 100% again very soon.

I saw my surgeon, my haematologist and my physiotherapist all within the past week. They all said that they were not interested in seeing me again for at least another year. I may never see my physiotherapist again in my life.

That's progress.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Looking for the Logic

This past week I stood in a colleague's office, uncomfortably warm in coat and boots, while she spun conjecture after conjecture, trying to make sense of a recent decision that would bring small good to either of us.

In response to an unpersuasive imperative and with an eye to cause as much unnecessary disruption as possible, several teams working for the Ministry are being moved from one building to another. Some of the moves will split offices (mine included) into two.

My colleague tried gamefully to make sense of the needless additional complications to our working lives. She said, "I'm looking for the logic here."

Because of my closer proximity to the core of decision-making, I had a bit more information. So I tried to help. 

"There is no logic," I reassured her.

This also sums up my feelings about the outcome of the US election.

Remembrance Day

Another colleague at work circulated for our Remembrance Day reading excerpts from a WW1 diary kept by an Irish officer who spent 14 months as a prisoner of war, commencing on October 24, 1917. 

The excerpt starts with the story of how he and a band of soldiers set out into no man's land to capture some Germans and, after becoming disoriented and mired in the muck of shell craters, were themselves captured. 

Any diary entries about the tedium and suffering of incarceration did not survive the excerpting process. It is not surprising that the stories the soldier retold on the 50th anniversary (in 1967) of his capture focused more on food - and the few fine meals he had while in transit to the final place of internment - and on the moments when he appreciated the beauty of the landscape through which he travelled as a captive. Here's an excerpt that includes both:

The journey for the next ten hours was not very exciting, as it was night, and nothing to be seen.  The next stopping place was Cologne, and a very beautiful place it appeared to be.  A splendid Cathedral was just outside the station, and as we had to wait some time, for another train, we had good facilities for looking all round us. A very broad river, the Rhine, runs through Cologne, and enormous bridges span it, carrying trains, trams and all sorts of vehicles. We went into a German soldiers buffet, and had the best meal since our Journey began: plenty of coffee, and we had bread, and we had a large bowl of soup and potatoes. When we had finished these we were given a huge German 'Wurst ' or sausage. We felt very contented, and for the next ten hours, were comparatively happy. We got into the train, and after going across one large bridge, after another, we started to go down the  Rhine valley. 

We have all heard of the beauty of the Rhine valley, but to hear of it, and to see it, are two different things, and it is hard for me to write of the picturesque scenes which I saw. The Rhine flows in a long curving stream in the valley at the bottom of a high ridge of hills, and this continues for many miles. Very little traffic was to be seen on the river, and it did not appear to be capable of carrying very large ships. The hills rise steeply from the banks, and are covered with a kind of heather, which must look very pretty in summer. The hills are not of great altitude, but tend to make the scenery very picturesque. Trains run along the sides of the river, and on the top of the hills are numerous castles, all seemed to be very old. It was clear that in ancient times, the barons must have had very hard skirmishes there, with only the river to cross, and they would be in enemy territory, but I am afraid that the difficulty of crossing the river then was much greater than would be the case, in these days of expert engineering.

My favourite passage is this, when the war's been ended, he's freed, has taken the train to Holland and is now on board a ship to take him home:

On board ship, the Captain asked me what I would like for supper. I asked if I could have some butter. Surely, said he, and when I went down to the dining room, what did I see, but a keg of butter, weighing at least a hundred weight, was on the table. Everybody was so kind, that tears were not far from my eyes.

Renovation Update - Spot the Difference

Stupid closet; old ceiling light fixture

Stupid closet gone; plaster applied to wall wounds. 

First coat of paint applied; new light fixture installed

These three photos show the major changes in our master bedroom. There's one small change. Can you see it in the photos? Leave a comment if you can!

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Hub Bub

Me at the office. Photo by Patrick Fancott.

Not long ago, someone at work said that, since Bruce and I did not spend $20,000 in Quebec to get my new hip, we should spend it on something nice.

I let them know that we had decided to spend the money on something nice. We're renovating the top floor of our home, which is wholly taken up by the master bedroom and ensuite washroom and ... a walk-in closet that had been converted by a previous owner into a sauna that we practically never used, and always worried about because of the dubious D-I-Y wiring job.

To compensate for the lost closet space, the previous owner built in a closet along one wall of the bedroom. This wasted all the floor space in front of the closet. I never liked this arrangement.

The impugned sauna. The little black dot is my lens cap.

 

All that's left of the closet and sauna. Now being recycled somewhere.

The contractor teams have been at work for the past week. Most of the demolition is done. We found a surprising pipe closet in the middle of the room, a drain hiding under the sauna floor, and a blocked register that explains, probably, why our ensuite is so cold in the winter.

The electrician brought an impressive array of tool boxes.

Behind the sauna control box: this is why we were worried about the wiring.

The old ceiling fixture, disposed. Always hated that, too.

The next big part of the job is taking out all the old carpet from the bedroom and four flights of stairs. More hub bub, but worth it.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen