Picture a very confused and slightly stressed yani...I mean today was pretty good (and the weather has been GLORIOUS again, if a little warm), but perhaps ultimately pointless in either the long or short term. Today we went looking at mattresses...
We did the usual grocery crap in the morning, then headed off to Le Cornu... which was a big mistake... I know I got my pretty red sofa from there, but the place is pretty much stuck in the 80's... or else it just feels that way after Ikea... and the furniture is just crappy looking for the most part... all overstuffed sofas and ugly crap.
So we wandered around there for a bit... then diverted to Kmart for no real reason other than to see if we could find Ma another top, since she'd decided that long sleeved was the way to go today and she was getting a bit overheated... that did mean that we were both in red for a while though, which was way too Bobbsy Twins... then we took a side trip over to Target Home (or as I prefer to call it, Target Homo) to have a vague look at quilt covers and whatnot.
I have to say that just currently if you want bedding in green or blue and you don't want stripes or flowers (or dinosaurs from the kid's section), you're pretty much shit out of luck... or at least you are anywhere I've looked today. So less fun there. And for something that doesn't seem to take a lot of actual skill to make (it is just two big pieces of material sewn together for the most part) they're fucking expensive!
I'm aiming for something in the "cool colour" range since I realised that all my bedding is either red or brown or some combination of the two... or red mixed with pink and yellow and orange... so basically it's all "warm tones".
Anyway, I couldn't find anything that I liked...
After a brief detour back here after picking up my dry cleaning, we headed into town to go to a couple of bed stores... I wasn't really looking "seriously", so I wasn't sure I really wanted anybody to come and assist me, and I'd avoided it earlier in Le Cornu, but the woman in Dreamland was obviously bored and ended up following us upstairs and half ambushed us. I was all for fobbing her off with a vague "I don't know what I want so I'm really just looking but not really looking" comment, but Ma went into a spiel and I just kinda stood there while the overly perky saleswoman went into her spiel.
And seriously, is there anything more uncomfortable in all the world (in a retail sense) than being more or less ordered to lay down and test mattresses... and really, other than going "that's too soft, that's way too firm" I really can't tell one from another. Okay, that's not completely true, there was one I laid on that was just "no, that's nasty", but I tried three that were pretty much all the same.
But she wrote them all down and the prices for the three best ones (ranging from about $650 to $850, so cheaper than the latex version) and took my name and wrote "free delivery" on the copy of the bit of paper she kept (I'm guessing they work on commission and she wasn't about to put all that effort in and then see me come back and talk to somebody else in the store)...
We followed that up with a couple of other places, neither of which were very impressive and then stopped off at the Central Market. The downside to that being the fact that when we got there everybody was shutting up shop. I'm sure they never used to close the place around 3.30pm, but obviously they do now, so we didn't really get to do or see very much, since half the places had closed and the others were in the process of shutting.
Even the little Asian bun place we usually go to, "Nana's" was all out of odd little Asian buns, but we did stop at the even stranger "Obun" (I think) stall and get these cute little hockey puck type "buns", one filled with cheese (and vague other stuff), one with custard and the other with, essentially, chocolate custard. The cheese I could live without, but the sweet ones were nice. Odd, but nice.
And I can't visit the market without stopping off at Goodies and Grains for some of their Belgian couverture chocolate. Except we discovered another new favourite too... "Veg Crisps", which essentially are just bits of vegetable that have been turned into crunchy crispy "chips"... which doesn't quite do the look of them justice... I mean they had whole green beans in there... and carrot (the carrot was my second fave bit... the beans being the first) and possibly zucchini as well as any number of unidentifiable things. I'm going to have to buy more, so there will have to be photos...
But once we got back here the real confusion set in... I don't know what to do about the whole bed issue... I need a frame, and while the Ikea one wasn't bad, it may be a little large for the spot (or need a larger mattress, depending on the whole double/queen issue)... but given that I sent my signed lease in on Friday and I could be one inspection away from living in a cardboard box (or, more accurately, at Ma's), is there really any point in buying a double bed and squeezing it into the rather tight space I have, or should I wait and see if I have to relocate, and then buy a bigger bed.
That was also about the point during my conversation with Ma that the whole lease/landlord/inspection thought process fell out of my mouth. I mean she knew large amounts of it, but I hadn't articulated the WHOLE story at any point, even to myself. I'm not going to go into it all again now (but if either the best or worse... or, you know, pretty much any version in between... comes to pass then I'll probably blog the story later)... but I think it's enough to say that it kinda felt better to get it out in the world, but it actually made me LESS confident of a positive outcome in my favour.
So, yeah... confusion with a side order of not going to end well...
Current Mood:
3 comments:
My advice for beds is go as big as you can fit in/afford. Have you slept in a double bed with someone else recently? Ugh. Need a Queen at a minimum I reckon! But maybe that's just me. (I am rather tall as you know and would take up most of a double by myself... so unless I went out with a dwarf....)
Is it urgent? Can you carry on looking until you know what the lease situation is? I'd also recommend going to bed shops rather than just general furniture shops. Not sure if you have Cap'n Snooze or 40 winks down in SA, but they both sell similar ranges so you can play one against the other and negotiate a good price. Free delivery is a no brainer. Good luck! :)
Tom, I can count on one hand the number of people I've actually SLEPT with in my current bed/house... and probably still have fingers left over (let's see, Adam, Seb, Ant, Bob... yeah, one finger left), so that's so not a factor... and you are a scary giant person, so your view is a little skewed.
And no, it's not really urgent I guess... except for the fact that both the mattress and frame I'm thinking about are on special, but it's possible that the mattresses are ALWAYS on sale. But I've had this mattress way too long now anyway, so what's a little longer...
I hear you on the furniture shop thing, the two places I got the most useful information from have both been bed/mattress stores... and yes, I think we do have both of those chains here, I'll have to jot them down for further excursions...
Yeah well, I have no need for more than one hand on which to do the counting either, but still. Optimism. :)
And I'm not that much of a giant, and hopefully not scary. Well, only sometimes. :P
Post a Comment