12 August 1999: Pillow Quest

Thursday, 12 August 1999:

Pillow Quest

Yes, I've rather fallen behind on my journal entries. Much of this is because I've been trying to prepare for Matt's arrival on Saturday, in addition to my usual busy life otherwise. So I'm not sure how much I'll write until Matt's visit is over.

For instance, I spent a chunk of Monday and Tuesday evenings looking for new pillows.

Okay, a big part of why it took so long is that I'm kind of finicky about pillows, and moreover I'm still not entirely sure exactly what to be finicky about.

I'm mostly a side/stomach sleeper, although I do occasionally sleep on my back. From this you can probably correctly guess that I'm also a very 'active' sleeper - I toss and turn a lot. On the other hand, I'm also a very sound sleeper; it takes a fair bit to wake me up, and even more to wake me to the point that I sit up and/or get out of bed. (I like being a sound sleeper, but I wish I could wake up and just jump up and get out of bed rather than lying around for 30-60 minutes.

Anyway, for the last several years I've owned a few 'squashed' fake-fill pillows (foam or polyester or whatever they put in there), and a couple of feather/down pillows that just never felt firm enough. So I've slept with the feather pillows on top of a couple of squashed pillows. So in addition to just wanting to make sure I had enough pillows for when Matt arrives, I also decided to try getting some extra-firm pillows.

So last Saturday, as I wrote, I went out looking for pillows. I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond, which had a very nice selection (and is a pretty interesting store besides, with lots of good kitchen stuff and home knick-knacks), and they had what looked like exactly the pillow I wanted, at about the price I expected - only not in Queen size! I did think of just buying a couple of Standard size pillows, but I did feel from my experience with both sizes on my Queen mattress that Queen was really what I wanted - something that would stretch the length of the bed, since I roll all over it during the night.

I learned that there was another BB&B up in San Mateo, which is about halfway to San Francisco, but I figured that I must be able to find what I wanted down in the valley. Well, it's remarkably difficult to figure out where to buy pillows. I drew up a list of stuff from Yahoo Maps, but driving around I found that most places listed as having 'bedding' are really not much more than mattress stores. I hit stores like Target, Mervyn's and Sears, but they mostly had fake-fill pillows, and the few feather pillows they had seemed of dubious quality and uncertain size.

So Tuesday I finally bit the bullet, drove the half-hour-each-way trip to San Mateo, and went to the BB&B up there. There I found exactly what I wanted - and they had exactly two in stock! Woo-hoo! So I finally completed my mission, and found over the next few days that they seem like fine pillows to sleep on. But boy, did it seem like more work than necessary.

(I later learned that I should have gone to Macy's, which apparently has a good selection of pillows. Probably I'll have forgotten about that eight years from now when next I want pillows.)

I've also spent a bunch of the week cleaning my apartment, and doing a bunch of laundry, to make things more presentable for Matt when he arrives. Although I know he's not too picky about such things. But I always use visitors as an excuse to go into a big cleaning frenzy. I am basically resigned to not having all my loose papers put away by the time he arrives, but that's okay. Mainly I just need to make a good dent in things.

I also may have mentioned that I've been trying to get my spending under control. I've been racking up large credit card bills ever since I moved here, and while it's not like I'm going into debt, I'm also not saving a whole lot of money. Happily, it appears that I've slashed my bills this month by about 40%, which is a good start. It's important to get into a mentality of 'I'm not even going to have time to look at or play with that stuff for another three weeks' rather than, 'I'm going to want that eventually, so I might as well buy it now.' I've pushed off a number of purchases 'till after Matt's visit on those grounds, and may push some of them off 'till even later, depending on circumstances.

Last night at Subrata's I brought over Australian Rails and Nippon Rails. We ended up playing Aussie Rails, and taught Ben how to play. Subrata ended up winning - mainly because he got an incredibly lucky set of cards with a large payoff early in the game - but the rest of us were all in more-or-less the same ballpark, so it was almost a close game! Ben pronounced the game a good one this morning, saying that he woke up from a dream of carrying exotic goods to strange locations.

Working out has been partly encouraging and partly discouraging recently: I tightened my belt a notch, and gained two pounds! I think what's happening is that I'm putting on a lot of muscle, probably faster than I'm getting rid of fat. But since (so everyone tells me) muscle burns a lot of energy just by existing, eventually I should start losing weight as well as putting on muscle.

And, the notch I tightened my belt to was in fact the smallest notch on that belt. I thought about punching more holes in it, but it's actually kind of a low-quality belt, so I headed to Target and bought a new belt, where I'm on the largest notch.

Better yet, I finally realized that I'd slimmed down enough that - yes, it's the subject that every on-line journaller should discuss at least once a year - I had to buy myself new, smaller underwear! Yes, it's quite a bit more comfortable. Especially when I'm working out.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)