Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

If the bed breaks, I’ll meet you in the springs.

Friday, Nov. 3, 2006
7:09 a.m.
Thanks for all your kind offers to come to your houses and finish off your leftover Halloween confections. While the temptation is great, if I come to visit, it won’t be for the candy, but for the company. So far I have withstood temptation, mostly because the mini-Aero bars are all gone and the others don’t interest me as much. Sigh.

We have guests, a husband and wife team, who have been here before and who are giving a concert tonight at the department. They are lovely people, he quite a bit older than she, and they have have grown children, which makes them older still than we. They arrived at about 6:30 yesterday evening, and I had spent the morning shopping and the afternoon preparing supper before I went to choir, so that by the time I sat down to the computer to update last night in a brief lull, I was totally brain dead and couldn’t think of anything more brilliant to say than what I did, which was perfectly true. Supper was pasta al cav0lfi0re from the M00sew00d Cookbook, a salad and apple/pear crumble, and we had a really nice bottle of W0If BIass Yell0w Label red wine to go along with it.

My one concern is that the bed might break. Several years ago we built a really nice guest facility in our basement, a bedroom with en suite shower, and we furnished it with our old double bed when we had graduated to a queen size. We had acquired it rather inexpensively (this is the understatement of a lifetime) in 1988 when we moved out of the house we rented in town after our first year here from the neighbours across the street who were also selling their house and moving to retirement facilities in another province. We bought from them the bed with matching end tables and triple mirrored dresser, a dining room table with four matching chairs, and a washer and dryer for the grand total of one thousand dollars ($1,000.00). Those are Canadian dollars, by the way, 1988 value, which means that they were extremely cheap by American reckoning. Anyway, except for the appliances, which have been replaced (twice, actually), the furniture is all solid wood, beautifully crafted, and had belonged to the elderly couple’s even more elderly mother(-in-law) who was moving with them.

We slept on that double bed for more than ten years, on the original mattress and box spring, and when we finally upgraded to a queen, put the double aside for guests. So many people have said that they have never slept so well as on that bed, and I must admit that it is an extremely comfortable surface. However, the box spring developed a crack in the wooden frame about a year ago, and being the procrastinators that we are, we never got around to a) fixing; or b) replacing it. The crack has gotten worse (has become two cracks) and is constantly in danger of falling out of the frame. Yesterday, before our guests arrived, we went at it with wood glue, but I fear that is like Hans Brinker with his finger in the dyke: not going to do much in the long run. So, I hope that they are both extremely quiet sleepers and don’t engage in hot monkey sex (which is something I burst out laughing trying to imagine) or else they’ll find themselves on the floor.

So, since I’m up so early, maybe I should be baking muffins.

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