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Friday, December 03, 2004

My in-laws are somewhere over the Indian Ocean right now. They'll be here at midday tomorrow. It really is a hell of a long trip, specially for old people ... I'm sure they're going to be absolutely exhausted when they finally arrive.

I am so looking forward to having them here. I don't feel very well organised, though. I had planned to have everything all beautifully shiny and sparkly and clean ... and that just hasn't happened. It may yet, of course, if I ever actually get up and get going. But at the moment the house is looking more than a bit worse for wear.

The in-laws will have a bed to sleep in , though. Finally. Remember I said that buying the bed was easy? Hah. Nothing is easy. Apparently everyone in the entire world but me knows that when the bed salesman assures you that the bed comes with "everything, absolutely everything, we're not like other bed shops who charge you for all the extras", "everything" does not include the headboard. Not even if the salesman is actually patting the headboard while he speaks. And, as I discovered on Tuesday when the bed arrived, a great big bed looks plain silly without a headboard. So I went back to the store and tried to buy a headboard. No can do, said the salesman, in an interesting switch from effusive friendliness to utter disinterest tinged with scorn. Not by Friday. Sorry. (But he didn't sound sorry in the least). So I went to the nearby competitor bed store and attempted to buy a headboard there. I was brutally honest with the salesman : all I wanted was a cheap headboard, with no funny wrought iron fake tassels on it, that was available immediately. Eventually I found one that met these criteria (and actually it was rather pretty : white metal leaves ...) Because nothing is ever simple, it turned out (for reasons that I didn't quite follow) that I could get this headboard by today if I had it delivered and paid $50. If I wanted to pick it up from the store and save the $50, I could only do that on Monday. So we stalemated for a while, because I had no intention of paying $50 for them to drive the stupid thing 2 miles. Eventually the salesman caved in, said they'd deliver it today, before 10am, for a token fee of $7. Yay me! Hah. Waited at home this morning this morning till 10.30. No bed. Call store. Long boring explanation from salesman, gist of which is that somehow the headboard never got ordered. But I can pick up the floor model if I want. Fine, I say. I'll be there at 3.30. Good, he says. I'll have it waiting for you. And sure enough he did have it waiting for me, if you count still having it all assembled on the shop floor as "waiting". Pfft. He disassembled it, lugged it out to the car for me, forgot to give me the screws (I had to remind him) and forgot to give me the key thingy to assemble it. (Lucky I realised). As I was leaving, screws etc in hand, I pointed out that the $7 delivery fee wasn't really such a great deal after all, was it? Since I was not only picking it up myself by also getting the shop floor model. He looked rather hunted, glanced around the store desperately, and seized a pillow from a rack behind the counter. Did I want this wonderful free pillow? Um, No. Thank you. And so we parted, hopefully forever.

Bobby thinks I'm crazy not to have taken the pillow. I, however, think that the pillow just added insult to injury, and I was damned if I was going to put my head on the stupid thing.

Anyway. The bed looks nice - albeit way too big for Soph's little room. When the folks have gone, though, it'll be mine and Bobby's. (We currently sleep on a mattress on the floor). We were making it up this evening - bed skirt, fitted sheet, flat sheet, blanket, quilt - and Soph goes "But mom, it's just like a hotel bed! All the layers!" Such is her family life : a world where home-made Hallowe'en costumes and beds with blankets and quilts are utterly unknown. Duvets all the way with my kids.

Oh, and speaking of being shown up as an Inferior Parent: at today's Brownie meeting the girls assembled and decorated absolutely gorgeous gingerbread houses. Gingerbread houses which the Brownie Mom had baked herself. All ten of them. From scratch. In her special gingerbread house pan with the little doors and windows. A dramatic raising of the bar for the rest of us who still have our meetings to do in the new year.

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