Once upon a mattress

For some time we have been determined to get a new mattress. Something about the fact that the current version has these body-sized craters on each side and also sloped toward the edges so that if one were not careful, one just might slip right out of the bed!

I had decided that when the fabled Economic Stimulus Payment came our way we would go mattress shopping. Well, I told you how that worked out, but we really had to do something, so we looked at Consumer Reports which said "I'm sorry, but you will never find the same mattress we reviewed in your store, so short of ripping them open to see how they are made, find something that feels good and sleep on it." Then we read consumer reviews on the Internet and decided you could support the viewpoint that the mattress should go on top of the sleeper if you Googled long enough.

I had been eying the Tempur-Pedic and the sleep number mattresses, and like the Internet, we have friends who said, "Oh, we have one of those and we really ______ it!" We had added a memory-foam topper on our current mattress (actually, we ended up with 2 and a mattress that was 2 feet tall) that seemed to help, so we gravitated toward the Tempur-Pedic. Now all we had to decide was which one of the 20 models we thought would be right for us. Finally, decision semi-firmly made, we went to the Relax The Back store and made the big (and I do mean big) purchase.

T-P and RTB have a 90-day trial, so if we decide it is like sleeping on wet sand we can return the mattress for a fee equivalent to a Hawaiian vacation. The only problem is, you want to hold on to the old mattress during this period or you might find yourself sleeping on the floor. Finally, we decided the old mattress could go between the couch and the wall in the front bedroom during this period. Of course, anyone sitting on that couch feels slightly threatened by the towering mattress leaning precipitously over them, but it's only for 90 days or less. Actually, it sort of makes that bedroom look like a padded cell, which may come in handy.

The store called and said if we could take late, late delivery (6 to 8 PM) they could have it delivered today. That meant canceling our plans to go party on 6th street, but for a good night's sleep.... We stripped the bed (what do you do with 12 cubic yards of foam topper?) and wrestled the old mattress to the front bedroom and waited. And waited. And. Waited. Six PM, seven, eight, nearly nine and finally two teen-aged boys showed up with a mattress in the back of a pickup. They said they had had a hard day. I said I thought I was going to have to sleep on a hard floor. But the mattress did get delivered and positioned for our first night of gloriously relaxing, back-mending, ache-healing sleep.

Stay tuned for the results of night number 1.