The Motion of the Ocean

This week, I was tweeting about my water bed and found out some very interesting things.
1. People think water-beds are either "so 70s" or "so 90s"
2. NOBODY else has one

The reason for my tweeting was simple - ours sprung a leak. At 6am. On my day off. As my day off had included some Big Plans for Sleeping In, I was not impressed.

Tell you what though, I am damn glad my fiancée noticed it when he did, because that water was pissing out. It was basically streaming out of one corner of the wooden frame at an alarming rate.

C knew just what to do. Whilst I stood about, bleary-eyed and stupid, he leapt into action. He grabbed my nail file, and inexplicably stabbed a hole in the window fly-screen. Then he told me to go grab a bucket, which I fetched from the laundry. Whilst I wedged this under the leak, he ran outside, grabbed the garden hose, unhooked it from the tap and fed one end through the newly-vented window mesh. He then proceeded to insert it into the water bed before dashing outside again. I don't know what he did, but within a minute the water was flowing out the hose, instead of onto my bedroom floor.



To the next problem, then. Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, we noticed that EVERYTHING that had been on the floor was soaked. In our bedroom, this means clothes and magazines. Lots of clothes, and lots of magazines.

Perhaps I should explain about the latter. No, it will take too long. Let me sum up. C had stacks of car mags on the floor at the end of the bed - and he will be throwing more than half of them out.

So we cleared away everything we could and then started putting towels down to try to soak up the water from the carpet. Luckily it was only into a few small patches around the bed. Carting piles of wet clothes and bedsheets into the laundry though, I wondered when we got such a heavy wardrobe.

At this point, I decided there was nothing more to be done for the present, went and lay down in the spare room and promptly fell asleep again for 2 hours. I think C got a little shitty with me about that. He stayed up and started putting on loads of washing and researching water bed repairers out of the Yellow Pages. He's so goddamn helpful in a crisis, it kills me.

Anyway, the water bed man (yes, Virginia, The Water bed Man does exist) came very late in the evening and assessed the damage. Nothing for it but to put in a new bladder, he pronounced. So out came the old one, to be unceremoniously gutted with the kitchen scissors in the ensuite shower -



- and in went a new one. $240 and an hour's worth of water later, we had a new water bed. Pity they take 24hrs to heat up enough to sleep on. Spare bed it was again for me - and C this time - that night.

Since sharing some of my saga on twitter, several people have told me that they get sick on water beds. I say I pity those people. Because they are such fun. To sleep (and do other things) on.