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Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Battle of the Beds


A while ago, I had a sleep over.  I had friends over and it was great fun.  However, it turns out that four teenagers plopping down onto a ten year old bed isn’t good for it.  One of the support beams bent, and after that, the bed was toast.  It perpetually leaned to one side, so that my mattress was at such an angle that I constantly felt like I was almost going to fall off the bed. 

http://dopplebanger.blogspot.com/2011/02/slang-gang.html
Me, always

I didn’t exactly have an alternative for what to sleep in, so at first I just put up with it.
However, spending every night doing my best not to fall out of bed wreaked havoc on my back.  After a while I was ridiculously tired, and I could barely make myself get out of that asshole bed every morning.  Which when you think about it, doesn’t make any sense.

I was still stuck with the bed though, so I grabbed some bins that used to be in my brother’s room when he was little and shoved them under there.  They were about the right size, and were able to keep my mattress horizontal.  But after a few weeks they got bent from the weight of a mattress, a box spring, and a Scamp laying on top of them every night. They weren’t the best quality bins. 

Okay bin, sorry I hurt your feelings.

So now I had a broken bed again, and no way to fix it.  I decided that the only way to get a good night’s sleep was to destroy the bed and sleep with my mattress on the floor.  I asked dad if he would destroy it for me, but he said something about needing to do something for work so he could “pay our bills” and “keep the lights on.”

It was bullshit.

So I decided that if I wanted this done, I was gonna have to do it myself. I asked dad what I would need to take it apart, and he gave me a screwdriver and a wrench.  I grasped my tools of destruction, and played some motivational music (the Eye of the Tiger to be exact.)  Then I screamed my war cry and attacked one of the screws.

Look at how fucking determined I am.

I sized up my enemy.  It was metal and kinda big and had princess designs on it because I got it when I was five.

In the first picture you can see all the princessyness. In the second one you can see my cat and the piece of my wall they had to take out to avoid water damage when there was a storm once. They kinda just duct taped it to the rest of my wall instead of fixing it. Yay!

I remembered the last war with this enemy.  You see, the bed used to be a canopy bed, but one day I decided that it would be more fun as monkey bars and bent the shit out of it.  The canopy was bent to hell, so my parents took it off.  Come to think of it, that may be why the bed revolted in the first place…
The purple is my attempt at drawing a sheer canopy. Yay!

Anyway, it was time to fight.  I tried to unscrew one of the posts from the end of my bed.  However, after successfully taking off one post, I discovered that the screws on the other post were stripped.  The screwdriver wouldn’t grab them no matter what I did.  (It also probably didn’t help that I had no idea what size screwdriver to use and was totally guessing.) I tried to take the screws out with my wrench, but it was hard to grip them because they were in little indentations (because whoever made my bed hates me.)
Whatever, I thought, I can just bring down this part of the bed with the post attached.

I then started work on trying to take the end off of the big black support beams that held up my mattress. This involved use of the screwdriver and wrench since there was a boly holding it all together in the back. Since there was a lip over the bolt, I had to try to use the wrench at the most awkward angle ever, making me think that the makers of this bed made it upside down while on all kinds of weird drugs.

http://shadow-w0lf.deviantart.com/art/Trippy-15861102
Knew it.

 My suspicions were later confirmed when I discovered that the screws sometimes decided “Fuck you!” and didn’t follow the righty tighty lefty loosey rule.


Because of this I accidentally tightened a bolt for ten minutes and almost gave myself an aneurism.
 
At this point I was desperate, and pissed off that I was being bested by a hunk of metal.  In frustration, I hit the bed with the wrench repeatedly, which just caused me to loose hold of the wrench and almost hit my cat with it.  Though really, I view that as my revenge for him being in the way the entire time.

Anyway, after about an hour of stripping screws further, tightening bolts, swearing, and throwing wrenches, I was able to prop all the pieces of the bed against one wall. But this left another problem… How the hell was I supposed to get that out to the garbage? 

The corpse of my enemy. Also my cat.

 The pieces were big, and some of them were rather heavy, especially the support beams. I asked Tim if he would help me, but he was busy with some stupid video game and said “Can’t you just wait like twenty minutes?”

UHM NO, NO I CAN’T. I JUST KILLED THIS FUCKER AND I JUST WANT TO CELEBRATE AND ALSO SIT DOWN.

I told him I’d just do it myself because it turns out everyone is an asshole and I have to do everything myself.  I grabbed the first piece of bed and started down the stairs.

What I didn’t realize was that I also had to open a door to get outside, I kinda forgot that part.  Since I was only carrying the end of the bed, it was relatively easy to set it down and open the door, but I couldn’t leave it open because of my stupid cats, and I had another end of bed and two support beams to carry out.

I decided to be innovative and find a place to put the cats that they couldn’t get out of, which excluded anywhere with a door.  Since my house is old and built on a wetland (developers in the 80s were brilliant) and therefore slowly sinking on one side, none of the doors close right and the cats can just budge them open.  I thought for a while and decided that the best place to put my kitties would be in the bunny cage.  

I hunted down and captured two cats and shoved them in the cage with the lagamorphs and locked them in.
The cats were not happy, and proceeded to glare at me and meow in a very pissed off tone. “Shove it cats” I said, they were gonna have to deal with it.

Even with the door propped open though, I still had a hard time getting the support beams down the stairs.  They’re huge, and heavy, and stair cases are narrow.  Also mine look like this:

Notice how I have to make a fucking 180 degree turn without hitting the airhockey table.

Yeah. And added to that, I had to get them past a glass door.  Needless to say, I almost broke the door.  Almost though, that part’s important.

After bring the corpse of my enemy out to the garbage where it belonged, I put my bedspring and mattress on the floor and claimed one of the bed’s posts as a scepter of victory.

Look at that victory scepter. Damn.
Also please enjoy my Frosty The Snowman pajama pants.

After that, I collapsed on my bed in exhaustion, enjoying my spoils of war, and my kitty joined in. 

Not only was I enjoying my victory, I was fucking exhausted.

It was hard work watching me do hard work, after all.