Elusive Sleep

Good sleep is not hard to get on an air mattress. Honestly, after seven months on one, I have no complaints about the way a good air mattress feels. The problem arises when the air bed decides it will no longer hold air, because the floor isn't such a great place for good sleep. I found that out the first night I stayed in the house with an air pump and a dead battery. We woke up this morning with that familiar sagging feeling, bringing our total up to three casualties. That's an average of one every two months or so, which is still cheaper than renting a clothes washer and dryer, but is still frustrating since each air mattress allegedly comes with a one year warranty.

I bothered to read the fine print the second time it happened, and of course it's not as easy as returning the flat air bed to the retailer; you have to have the original packaging and the original receipt and drive it down to the manufacturer's warehouse (or mail it at your own expense if you don't live close to such a warehouse) and then they will decide whether or not the item was in fact defective. Even flat, these things are so heavy and hard to pack up again that it seems easier to just buy a new one than to try cashing in on the warranty. Maybe they only expect these air beds to be used for camping five times a year. Maybe 375 pounds of people is exceeding some intrinsic weight limit. Maybe we can get them on some kind of rotation schedule, so that when the new one poops out, another will be on its way back from the warehouse.

I wish we could just buy a real mattress and be done, but that would be better than twenty times the price and until the move happens we have no means by which to integrate a new mattress into the rest of our possessions or transport it from here to Point B. Even if the price tag was our only concern, I never have liked the idea of a used mattress, especially now that the new age of the bedbug is dawning.

Just to shake things up a little more, there's a strange wrong number that keeps calling David's cell phone at 4 AM. Nothing quite gets the adrenaline flowing like the phone ringing in the dead of night, especially when the only people who call that early are naval authority figures who want your @$$ out of bed. If Mr. Nobody calls again tonight, so help me, somebody is going to answer or call him back.