I found romance when I start to dance...

I haven't looked up when the Olympics are over because I thought they only lasted for 2 weeks - and now I'm scared they're going to go on forever. Last night was the first night that I decided to watch something ELSE instead of the endless diving and Bob Costas chatter. Instead, we watched the first episode of Heroes in preparation for when Season 2 comes out very soon. And then we watched some more Olympics. *sigh*

We don't have cable. It makes a lot of financial sense to not have cable TV right now. It saves us a significant amount of money and instead we buy DVDs/TV seasons that we can watch over and over again. We try to monitor our spending, but if there were two things of which I am an impulsive buyer, it'd be Craft supplies and DVDs. I simply can not resist that Walmart 5$ bin. So at least we're not spending money on DVDs AND Cable.

Every morning, since the 2008 Olympics began, I have rolled out of bed with the energy of a zombie sloth. I hold my coffee at an incline to my mouth until it is gone approximately 10 seconds after I get to work, and then I pass in and out of self-awareness until my husband shows up and takes me home. Then the Olympics come on.

I don't understand the problem here. I'm 24... that's young. Really young. I can tell that when I'm thirty I'll look back at the age of 24 and think "what a young idiot I was" just like I do now, when looking back at age 16. When I was in college I was like the energizer bunny. I had classes and clubs, groups to sing in, people to hang out with, and parties to be at. I could stay up until 3-4 in the morning, and still be bright eyed and bushy tailed for class 6 hours later. Here I am at 24 staying up until Midnight - at which point I no longer have the will to shower or brush my teeth (I'm a night time shower-er) - faced with 7 hours of sleep and I'm crumbling like a stale Entenmann's coffee cake. And so the wii-fit would probably tell me my "real" age is 81.

As I see it, the issues that are getting in the way of my waking as a human sloth and gradually morphing into more-human-than-not RATHER than waking as a zombie sloth and staying a zombie sloth. Period. are as follows:
1) Bob Costas
2) Michael Phelps
3) China

My dear husband thinks otherwise. Greg thinks that the reason I wake up with the grunts of "braaiiinnss" is because of our mattress. Our mattress was part of an EXTREMELY generous gift from his aunt and uncle. You see, when two people get married, that means they like each other, and that means they want to have sleep overs all the time... in the same bed. Up until about a month before our wedding, our newly married couple sleeping options were A) a Twin sized bed, B) Skeevy carpet, C) to go into DEBT buying a new bed! WOOO!

And as cozy (twin), avant-garde (carpet), and exciting! (Debt!) as those options sound - we were deeply touched (read: relieved) when Greg's aunt and uncle decided to loan us, and then officially give us, their spare, beautiful, wooden, antique bed. We got the mattress and box spring with it too which, unfortunately, are also both antique.

It's a full size bed. While I don't want to sleep in it forever, it's fine for now. Greg is 6 feet tall, and I complain more about it than he does. I have a feeling our breaking point for the small bedsize will come when I'm pregnant and won't shut up about how I feel like I'm a beached whale and can we PLEASE GET A BIGGER BED BECAUSE THE WOMAN INCUBATING YOUR CHILD NEEDS MORE SPACE and some pickles. Until then I'll just keep testing the waters.

You know that boat racing sport with the two people and the fast boat? The one where the boat turns so hard that the mast is almost parallel to the water surface and the people hang off the side of the boat to help keep it from, you know, crashing?

I have forgotten what it is like to sleep in a bed where I am not either desperately imitating those sailors by draping my body over the edge of the mattress or sinking into a pit of elbows and knees and lava in the center of the bed. I have a hard time getting to sleep at night and I am a don't-touch-me-i'm/you're-too-hot kind of sleeper. I need some space and I like to be cool. This occasionally leaves Greg cold and shivering, clinging to his side of the mattress so that he doesn't slide into the center pit and possibly touch me. If he DOES touch me, I spontaneously combust.

Mostly this amuses Greg, but there are moments of understandable frustration.

If I am unhampered by sinking pits, spontaneous combustion or beds the size of match boxes - I sleep as spread out as possible. Due to various, cruel hotel stays, we have discovered that I can sleep in my natural state and Greg can cuddle with me (in air conditioning) and everyone is happy in a KING sized bed.

I. cannot. WAIT. to. get. a king. sized. bed.

We can't fit a king sized bed up our stairs right now, so we either have to appropriate the living room... or I have to excercise a little patience. My patience's stomach muscles are a little sore - but the quads are holding up well.

In the mean time, Greg has latched on to the idea that all we need for REALLY GOOD sleep at night is to replace our antique mattress. At first I scoffed because I'm the type of person who hates the little upgrades. I would rather live with something really awful for a year and then replace it with the best than replace it immediately with something OK and then have to wait five years to get the thing you really wanted in the first place. So I thought that we would make due with the mattress and box spring until we got a king! sized! bed!

But with a little nudging, I started to come over to the idea of getting a new mattress set. Maybe it would help with my neck cricks in the morning. Maybe a new mattress will solve some of my sciatic pain. Maybe I'll love it. Maybe it'll be better than chocolate chip pancakes.

About a week ago we went to our first mattress store, where I unfailingly fell in love with one of the most expensive mattresses there. Designed by Vera Wang. Yes - ladies and gentleman - I am now obsessed with a mattress that was designed by a gown designer. It is not BECAUSE Vera Wang designed the mattress - it is because when I lay down upon it I heard angels singing and saw a rainbow descend from the heavens and there were leprechauns and baby deer and corn dogs. Of course Greg isn't thrilled because the mattress is a tetch expensive. But it's on sale, and the guy guaranteed us the sale price and brought even THAT down by $100 (I think I can get him to bring it down a little more, too).

Greg wants to lay on every mattress in creation before making a decision. I asked him if he had to choose a mattress from the mattresses that we've already checked out, which one would he pick and he asked, "What do you mean?". My eye is starting to twitch just thinking about that conversation.

Anyway, we've been to a grand total of 2 stores so far. I know. SO many right? But our first mattress store experience TOTALLY freaked both of us out when the sales person started describing how our old mattress is probably completely infested with dust mites and how people shed skin and sweat at night and dustmites just love the soup that skin flakes and sweat makes. Skin and sweat soup. And for our second outing, Greg made the mistake of insisting we go to a mattress store on Monday of this week which was 2 days before I opened my etsy store and I was a leeettle bit stressed out about that and I may or may not have been a big grumpy puss the whole time.

So we've made a few compromises.

1) We'll go to ONE more store and Greg will seriously entertain the notion of spending half-a-load of money on a (angels singing, leprechauns dancing!) mattress.

2) I will seriously cut back on my craft store visits, dvd purchases and we will pretty much cut out any food ordering for two months and Greg will seriously entertain the notion of spending half-a-load of money on a (angels singing leprechauns dancing!) mattress.

He followed up my offer to cut out craft store visits with "But, what if you need something for your etsy store? We can still go to craft stores if you need to." Isn't he cute?

So I refuse to think of this situation as limiting or restricting. This is a challenge my friends. This is a pathway to greatness and to the kind of sleep I had before I saw the movie Gremlins. The challenge is to see how many crafts I can work on and complete using only what I own already for two months. For those of you that have seen the photos of my craft room - you know that amount is not small.

I can do this. I will persevere.
And my prize is to sleep with Vera Wang.... or something like that.