Blanket Wars

We've always has a water bed since we were first married.  This one we have now is our third one.  Our first one was purchased in 1972 from money hubby's dad gave us when we married.  It was an early model before they got fancy.  It was a bag with water in it.  Cold to the touch, nothing insulating it from your skin.  If you didn't heat it up, sleeping on it would chill you to the bone.   I was suspicious of the heating element and worried about electrical currrents running under our body, but it was amazingly warm when you got into bed.  We kept it at body temperture and it ate up the electricity.

It was a full motion bed, so if you got up in the middle of the night, you rocked the other person around.  When you got back in, the other person would rise up and sometimes roll out of bed.  It was on the floor, no pedestal to raise it, just four bolted together pine boards, with no cross support.   It had a half ass liner that fell down and hard corners that knocked into my hubby's ankles when he tried to walk around it.  He used to drop down from a standing height and bounce me out of it.

We passed it on to my hubby's little sister and she kept it her teen years till she went off to college.  I remember tucking my father in law into it when he came to visit when he came down after a drug induced mania.  He slept for a full day like he was in a womb.

Sex on a water bed is easy and relaxed for some positions and impossible and challenging for others.  Comical even as we tried to navigate the high seas and keep our balance as we worked our way through the karma sutra.     Some things are best done on dry land.

Our next waterbed was a baffled one with channels that kept the waves from reaching titanic proportion. it was more expensive and very complicated to drain and move.  The foam baffles had to be pumped completely dry or the thing would weight 600 lbs and it didn't like being set back up.  We moved it once and it never recovered from that.  The second move to Florida 6 years ago, it broke and ripped, and we filed an insurance claim and got our new one.   It looked like a dead walrus on our apartment floor, where it sat discarded for weeks till I managed to get some burly guys to remove it.


This one.  This one cost some bucks. We had sold our house and had some bucks to spend.   It has a mattress cover zippered around it, and individual cells that fill up with good support.   It doesn't wave like the high seas in a hurricane.   It sits up from the ground and has covered edges on it. Corner guards to lessen hubbys knocks at midnight.    It is a bit easier to put the sheets on.   We set it up and moved it twice now. It's a trooper.   However it collects lint.

Water beds have walls that keep their shape.   Those walls are lined with plastic and the water bed smooshes up against them.   Once and a while, one needs to be brave and wipe down the walls, pulling the bed back and exposing the debris that finds itself shed off the people and animals and kids that camp out on the bed, the center of the home, where all family business is conducted.  Lost combs, candy wrappers,  dental floss, socks, panties,  eye glasses, a few squished bugs, lost books and lots and lots of shed skin and hair find their way to the edges and down hidden from the casual vacuum wand.  It takes one person to wipe and vacuum and one person to hold back the heavy mattress to expose the sides and bottom.  If you try it by yourself, if you are fit enough,  using one leg to stand and one leg to nudge back the bed, you can manage.   Lose your balance and you end up doing the splits on the bed's wooden edge.

So back to blanket wars.

Waterbeds are tough to make.  The last corner of the bottom sheet will not stay tucked in.  The three sides are stretched and tucked securely and the last side comes up short.  It takes a bit of tugging and pulling to get the last corner even started.   For some reason, hubby when he makes the bed, leaves my side the last corner to tuck in.  

On bad weeks. I sleep with a sheet that pulls off on my side.   When I make the bed, I leave his foot corner for last and he kicks loose sheet  around and glares at me.   If I am feeling maligned. I short sheet him too, giving him a less than generous top sheet, so his toes stick out. 

Well, I fantasize about short sheeting him, but I really don't.  I mete out the width evenly.  I fear his retaliation.    He has huge leverage in his feet and can snag one end of the sheet with his toes and draw them off my shoulders with ease.   Off my shoulder, exposing my bottom and he's home free with the sheet wrapped under his body like a malignant buritto, wrapped securely in his ill gotten treasure.

Now that we are in Florida, the blanket wars are more benign.  We don't freeze if one gets greedy with the blankets.  In Northern climates it woke us up and made us regroup and play fair.  Here in the South it's more of a sport.