With all of my medical issues, I need a recliner and our reclining love seat broke beyond usefulness after the Great Flood. Attempts to sleep in bed almost always fail. Attempts to sleep upright in the broken recliner leave me with my head leaning too far forward (hyper-pronating) or backward (hyper-extended) both of which are bad. I tend to wake up in monstrous amounts of pain when I can sleep at all. That's once every 2-3 days.
The good news was that we acquired the money to buy a new recliner very shortly after the Flood. The bad news was that it seemed impossibly stupid for me to buy a new piece of furniture when a contractor will be coming in here to work. I was going to say shortly but we've been waiting quite a while for reasons that are largely my fault. I'm going out of my mind from pain here and yet I didn't want my new recliner getting drywall dust or worse all over it. The contractor seems like a nice guy so I didn't want him to have to carry the new chair back out to storage while he worked when I could just wait and have him merely throw away the old love seat for me.
There I was just about out of my mind from pain and I found myself reading those Donaldson books that I mentioned in the last entry. Why was I putting off replacing the recliner again? Well, there was that concern about getting new furniture dirty but I couldn't care less in so much pain. I'm long since done trying to please the people who would care and they have accepted this fact. The dirty furniture problem melted away. God forbid I need to vacuum the drywall dust off it. It would take another flood to recreate the gooey mess of my current furniture.
The contractor is going to have to remove all of my useable furniture and store it while he works. I felt grateful for the fact that he's willing to carry out the disgusting broken stuff as well and I continue to feel grateful. It's also part of the job. I want to make the job as easy as possible but I know that I suffer from excessive expectations. Learning to live within my limitations involves things like letting people do their jobs. It's not like he asked me to hold off replacing any furniture or anything.
That leaves my problem with enjoying the look of a nice wad of cash. It's a beautiful thing and it was a gift from a very generous member of my family, Melissa's Uncle George. I sort of stood there looking at the money and thinking about saving it for something that we really need. (After all, the money was given to Melissa but he knows as well as anyone that we are a matched set.) First, there was the water heater and it took me a week to decide that running water was important enough to dip into the funds. I wanted Melissa to be the one to make that decision but I'm the one who is home when the plumbers are open for business.
Sunday night, I explained my logic to her and she agreed that it was probably a bad idea to keep waiting and waiting. She's been the one who has been stuck witnessing what the pain has done to me over time and she had just accepted the "fact" that we had to wait like I did. Once I mentioned my epiphany, she was all for replacing my chair. We went to the local "Big Lots" and it was tough to force myself to make a choice.
It wasn't tough to pick out exactly the one I wanted. I made a beeline for it when we entered the department. The headrest was high enough that I could simply rock back without worrying about doing last damage to my neck. When I reclined it all the way, there was no gravity issue. Normally, recliners are a problem because the headrest tends to bulge out so my surgical scar area faces maximum pressure. When I got up and looked at it, I could see exactly why this wasn't a problem. While I don't remember the name of the style of headrest, it does not bulge out in the middle.
You know how it is when you go to an animal shelter and certain kittens make eye contact with you and then decide you make an excellent pillow. Well, there's also the feeling when the kitten you're fostering decides out of the blue that she's de-dopted already. Alright. I'll stop with that comparison before I anger someone. Instead of having the starving kitten in my arms, I was the tired aging guy who felt gloriously comfortable. Not falling asleep right there in the store was tough. I wanted them to strap me in and deliver me with my new chair but the gentleman in the furniture department brought up one "practical" concern. It was a floor model and they were going to bring me one from the warehouse so I might as well go home and wait.
This will be in my home by bedtime tomorrow. I can't remember what color it was because all I wanted was something that would not stain quite so easily. It would also be nice if it hid cat fur. I would love to show you the desk we didn't buy but that I admired way too much. I don't want to push my luck too much with Blogger but I've decided that I want an old fashioned secretary's desk with the door that pulls down to become a writing surface and all of those wonderful cubby holes. It's not a real period piece but I'm a history geek. Once upon a time, employers actually wanted their workers to have useful private spaces in their work areas. I think I might have drooled when I saw all the available room for a ruler, pencils, colored pencils and Pentel RSVP pens. You might have other preferences but those are mine.
The desk is cool but the recliner might just add years back onto my life.
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