OK, I was about to pass out but I'm having a little burst of mental energy, so one more entry before bed...
Due to lack of finances (not by choice) I was off of my Ambien for an entire month. I tried really hard to sleep each night, I just took my "normal" Lorazapam and things like Fiorinal, calcium, magnesium, and even some Valium I had around the house, but I still didn't sleep. My husband tried keeping the cat out of the bedroom during the day while I tossed and turned. She'll nap with me which is actually very nice, but she'll also come in and try to get into the windows and bang the blinds around which will wake up even a sound sleeper, which I am not.
Monday afternoon Sparky was making the bed after I abandoned it for the day when he suddenly let out a yelp. The fitted sheet at the bottom of my side of the bed was shredded! Of course, he blamed it on me, even though he has the toenails of death and I usually wear socks to bed. I'm still wondering if the kitty had anything to do with it because there were two parallel rips, but I honestly think it just gave out from age. We have a California king and he'll yank on the sides to try and tuck them in.
Since it was Labor Day, and my Foley's bill was due in a week or so anyway, I decided to grab the coupons out of the paper and drive across town (to the "nice" mall) and get another sheet set. I worked in retail most of my life so I do at least know how and when to buy linens. For $80+ bucks I got a top and bottom sheet (it would have been $130+ regular priced), but alas, no new pillowcases. I'm not real keen on replacing my pillowcases, though, because they're SOO soft and my skin is hypersensitive. I had to touch test all of the sheets at the store and ended up with some Wamsutta 300 count cotton sheets in a nice colonial blue. And I found the comforter set I'd been looking for for the past ten years (seriously). It's by Ralph Lauren and called Putney Paisley. Finding a cobalt blue paisley comforter is next to impossible, so I'm going to really work on getting this one. Our drapes are royal blue and most of the bedding I find is either navy (which looks like crap) or mostly white with a little blue. My two big goals for the bedroom are to paint the walls blue and replace the burgundy comforter set with a nice blue paisley one. So another $250 for a new comforter, $110 for a bedskirt, $80 for pillow shams (sigh).
So I came home, washed the sheets and added some fabric softener and we remade the bed. All of the damn sheets at the store were "extra deep" so it's still too wide (besides being a CA king, we have a Tempurpedic mattress which is not very deep), but it'll work.
But that night I lay in bed for like an hour, tossing and turning, and finally I actually got out of bed and tiptoed into my office, found the receipt for my Ambien and called it into the pharmacy so I could pick it up when I got up that afternoon. I just couldn't stand it anymore. I've never been good at sleeping and now I have additional stupid health problems that cause insomnia so I caved and spent another $80 to get a month's worth of sleeping pills. Even with them, I don't always sleep well, but at least the odds are in my favor again.
Homework: A Household Meme questions from last three weeks...
HomeWork: Week 31
What about outdoor work: how much time do you devote to it? Is your yard well-manicured, or does it tend to look like a prairie? Do you sweep your porch regularly, or only when leave and dust begin to create visible hills? If you have an apartment with little or no outside maintenance required, did this play a part in your decision to live there?
Acck, neither my husband or I do yardwork. We have people come in every two weeks and mow the yard and blow the pine needles off the roof. I'd really like to have a nicer looking yard, but I can't tolerate the heat or pollen from working outside. Amazingly, though, our yard is pretty healthy.
HomeWork: Week 30
Do you have a "junk closet"? "Junk drawer"? A junk room? Where do you stick stuff that has no other designated home? Does it bother you, or is it a case of "out of sight, out of mind"? Snap a picture of your catch-all space, if you're brave.
I try really, really hard NOT to have junk repositories around the house. I'll actually file stuff in lieu of leaving it sitting around whenever possible. I have a little rolling milk crate thingy under my desk that I dump random magazines in, and a big magazine sized envelope in the crate that I try and put loose receipts in as soon as I've recorded them in my checkbook, etc. Then I'll go through and file or trash them maybe two or three times a year. I have folders in my filing cabinets for things like medical and pharmacy receipts, post office receipts, and the masses of weekly eBay paperwork I accumulate. I have a shelf devoted to just magazines and catalogues and I try and weed it out every so often... Piles of paper follow me around and breed like rabbits so I have to make a huge effort to fight them off.
Actually the ickiest room in our house is probably the garage because I have a lot of random packing materials for eBay out there. I actually have some of it organized, but all of the boxes waiting to be reused tend to be a leaning tower of terror sometimes.
HomeWork: Week 29
How do you cope with living with other people whose ideas of "clean enough" differ drastically from yours? Are your housemates comfortable with much more clutter than you are, or perhaps much less? What compromises have you found? (Or do you compromise, in the case of family or children?)
My husband is a neat freak in ways I'm not and vice-versa. He likes to vacuum constantly and neither of us like to leave dirty dishes lying around. But instead of putting them in the dishwasher he'll balance them all on a towel on the counter to dry which drives me nuts.
I don't care if the bed doesn't get made daily, but it drives him nuts. Our compromise there is if I make it I'll throw the comforter over the pillows instead of laying all of them on top of it so it's easier to unmake. (We have tempurpedic pillows, they weight a ton).
He also has even more stuff than I do, but we sort of divided the house up - I get my office/living room, most of the kitchen, the hall bath and the master bedroom. He can put his stuff in the rest of the house (his room is a claustrophobic's nightmare). He's trying to work his way into the master bedroom, he thinks I haven't noticed, but I'm keeping an eye on it ;-) It's the only room in the house which is sort of unfinished and he's been told he's not allowed to clutter it up.
We each dust our own respective rooms (usually before company comes over), and clean our own bathrooms, etc.
OK, I've been swamped this week and too busy (and brain dead) to type, but this story is too good to not pass on: