Snow Day

I meant to post this yesterday. Really I did.

I left for work like a good little soldier despite the fact that the sky seemed to be dumping snow at a movie-machine- fake alarming rate...mostly because I work for people who believe that if you live in the Northern Tier you need to put your big girl panties on and deal with bad weather and I wasn't in the mood for recrimination.

I drove about halfway to Mansfield at around 27 MPH. Yes, I'm that person in front of you with a 10 year old car and no 4 wheel drive. You can hate on me all you like, after you pass me I'll pull up behind you when you end up in the ditch and hold your head until the ambulance comes.

But wonder of wonders, I was diverted with a phone call and given leave to return to Tranquility Base and I did so. Even cranked it up to 30 or so. I barely made it up the steep street that leads to mine, scurried in the house, and never stuck my nose outside for the rest of the day. So no, I didn't take the picture above. Someone from the Grand Canyon Snowmobile Club did.

I love a snow day. Read books, did my nails, took a nap, took another nap. The huz was also home, doing his thing. I was given stern direction not to use him as 'blog fodder', so I can't say much about him. I'm not allowed.

Besides, he hasn't done much that was funny lately. But we've had our adventures.

When we were first married, we lived in a ridiculously small apartment. In fact, the last college dorm room I lived in (Naugle Basement, Messiah College. Holla!) was roughly 2 1/2 times the size of this place. We had just enough room for a tiny table, a couch, a double bed, and a TV on a pressboard stand that could be turned so it was in our 'bedroom', or in the 'living room'. The building itself had been a mansion at one time in the dimly distant history; when the property was sold and subdivided to make a development of homes we would never be able to afford, the old house was also subdivided into apartments. It is a three story house. They managed to make it into THIRTEEN apartments. The bedroom portion of the apartment actually stuck out from the side of the building, with supports underneath it; it looked like a treehouse. A treehouse built over a parking lot.

So naturally, we got a water bed.

I worked for a moving company and someone in my Florida office offered me this bed. My agreeing to this involved the acceptance of a couple of half-truths involving ease of assembly that, in retrospect, I am ashamed I fell for. The bed arrived, a pile of unrecognizable lumber and a headboard that could best be described as 'redneck chic'. (Kind of like this one, only with roses painted on the mirror. Can you hear the strains of 'Sweet Home Alabama' in the background? Thought so.)

We put the bed together in about an hour. It was startling; it didn't look like much in a pile but assembled, it commanded a full 1/3 of our apartment, effectively filling the 'bedroom' alcove. I wasn't about to turn back now; I spread out the liner, and then it was time to deal with the mattress. We squared it up, hooked up the filling hose deal and connected it to the mattress and let 'er rip. Wow, waterbed mattresses fill up pretty fast. And somewhere between quite a lot of water and a metric buttload of water, we realized, hey, it might not be a bad idea to check this mattress and make sure it doesn't, you know, have any holes in it.

The Huz and I hauled up a corner of the mattress to have a look, and sure enough, there was a bit of water between it and the liner. There was a large hanging tag on the spout to the mattress so I searched it for some helpful advice. It said something like this:

CONDDENSATION SOMETIMES DOES FORM BETWEEN MATRESS AND LINER.

PLACE A TOEL IN BETWEN TO ADSORB.

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

So I got a tea towel and jammed it in there. Fifteen minutes later, I heard a squirting noise that filled me with dread. I ran around the bed looking for the leak, heart pounding. But it wasn't my bed. It was my downstairs car-obsessed neighbor out for his 11:30pm car wash. Relieved, I hauled up the mattress again.

I had a feeling at this point it wasn't condensation; the tea towel was floating on a gently wafting eddy of water. Crap. I started thinking about the 'liner', the sheet of plastic that stood between this moment and me losing my security deposit. I took out the 'Magic Drain', this contraption that was supposed to drain a waterbed via the kitchen faucet, and hooked it up.

One thing the Magic Drain folks fail to tell you is that it takes HOURS to drain a waterbed. We lay down on the floor and tried to sleep with the whole thing running. I only slept long enough to have a dream that seemed very much like Airport '77, complete with singing nuns and Darren McGavin. At 5 o'clock in the morning the mattress was sufficiently flaccid and we shut off the water. I figured, hey, there isn't that much in there, I'll just drag it into the shower and drain it.

Here's your science lesson for the day, kids: water is heavy. Water in a giant plastic sack laying in a wooden frame two feet above the ground without handles hates you and wants you to die. We dragged it, we pulled it, it fell on us and we crawled out from under it, I wrestled with the drain opening for half an hour and finally slashed it open with scissors and let it drain, and dragged the whole mess into the dumpster at dawn. Then we called Dial-a-Mattress or somesuch and got a proper bed.

I realize that isn't a Huz story. But its the one that came to mind on the way to The Day The Whole Fire Department Came to Our House. Next time, perhaps.

Please visit humor-blogs.com and see who else all your base belong to.