Thread Drift

Hope all went well Crankin, as I am sure it did!

Trek, your new place sounds great, glad you and Knotted are happy with it! Give her my best.

My new bed was delivered today - so I decided to get a set of new sheets as the mattress is thicker than my old one. Went online and searched for sheets for mattresses that are x inches thick and my jaw dropped. SALE prices were well over $100, with "regular" prices much higher than that and I'm not talking about 600 count Egyptian cotton sheets either. For full size sheets, it isn't like I've a "California King". What kind of dope are they smoking? I went to Bed Bath & Beyond and found a nice set of buttery soft sheets that fit great for <$50. Perhaps I'm in the wrong business. It's also the first time I've looked around that particular store and I can see that I need to be careful about when I return.

I don't need to buy sheets very often, but I was really shocked at the prices - and that I found much better prices at local stores than online.

Sheets are expensive, but when you find the ones you like, for the right price, generally, you should buy moe than one set, as they seem to change from year to year.
This reminds me, it's almost time to switch out the flannel sheets for the regular ones. We are still having nights in the 30s every few days, so probably will wait until May 15th.

I buy our sheets from LL Bean, that way if they pill up or seams fail, I can return them.

I wanted to try out the sheet set before buying more but I like them. First time I've tried sateen weave rather than percale and I like them much better. Apparently Bed, Bath and Beyond has a good return policy as well. It was time to set aside the flannel sheets anyway.

I like the new bed, which is good considering the cost (I've 90 days to return or exchange). I've read it will take a few nights to break it in but even after the 1st night I woke up remarkably pain free :-)

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After trying bamboo sheets, I can no longer truly enjoy other type of sheets. But they are soooo expensive when you get the 100% ones (not the mixed type). To me anyway. And in Canada, it is hard to find them at a decent price too. Only one store carries them in my area and I've put my name on their sales list so when that set comes on sale or that they have a coupon for first item at 50% I jump at the chance to purchase a set. I now have 3 sets (one is in the motorhome). They last forever so I should be good for a while. For a king size set it is nearing 200$. That is way too much money for my taste for sheets. So when on mega sale, it is worth it. But rarely on sale. But yes, good sheets are rarely cheap. The price to pay to get a decent (if I can say decent) when past menopause. I never or rarely sweat in those as they adjust to body temperature.

Helene, that's good to hear, I was looking at set of bamboo sheets but they were so sort I was afraid they'd pill up.

What, you don't sleep in flannel all year round? It's so soft and not hot at all. Then again there might be a week or two in August that I don't sleep in a couple of layers of wool .....

Try pricing organic cotton flannel :eek: I try not to buy conventional cotton, it's so toxic. But I don't know why I have to order USA made organic cotton linens from a company in Canada. Sigh.

The flannel starts making me uncomfortably warm, as soon as the temperatures at night get into the 50s on a regular basis, despite the fact I keep my house cool at night.

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Originally Posted by Pax

Helene, that's good to hear, I was looking at set of bamboo sheets but they were so sort I was afraid they'd pill up.

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http://www.linenchest.com/en/bamboo-...ollection.html

Those stayed perfect forever. Never had pilled up. Ever. They are soft as silk too. But they are heavier then sheets. And to wash them is a bit of a pain because of the weight. I can wash the set at once but to dry it is better to do them in half due to weight (takes forever). That is why I have many sets. I can switch and do my bed right away without having to wait for it to dry. Now weather is good so it dries outside. But in winter, it can take a good 50 minutes to dry just half of the load.

But personally, I will not go back to other sheets. Oh yeah...hubby says he's too cold in there so what I did to satisfy both of us.... I cut the fitted sheet in half. yes.... And he has his own flannel side and I have my own bamboo. Satisfied couple! :) The flat sheet is all bamboo. He does not mind the top.

I could never sleep in those flannel, comfort or whatever other sheets called "warm".

So yes bamboo sheets are not cheap. The quality ones anyway. But the 1st set is over 8 years old and still looks good. Now I am using it in the motorhome as I don't really mind if it wears out quickier (campgrounds requires more indoor maintenance. :)

So Pax, no need to worry about piiling up. Oh...another thing. If not folded properly, they will look so crinkled. Crazy. But once on your bed, they are perfect. I just changed my sheets this morning. I can't wait to get in-between. haaaaaa.

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Originally Posted by Helene2013

in winter, it can take a good 50 minutes to dry just half of the load.

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Yikes!

There's a Fellini movie, I want to say 8-1/2? that has a brief scene showing women doing laundry, and to dry the bedlinens, they had these huge wooden hemispherical frames in a covered atrium.

I wonder what people in humid climates did before dryers were common. Where we live in Florida, on a sunny day when the humidity's "normal," we have about a three-hour window where we can dry laundry outdoors before the humidity comes up so high that they start getting more damp instead of less. If it isn't sunny, forget about it. I used my dryer more in Florida this December and January than I did the whole rest of the year. Put together. Not exaggerating.

Even in northern climates where indoor heating dries everything out, many if not most people wouldn't have had enough space for drying bedlinens. I have no idea what they did. Heck I live very close to lots of Amish and Mennonite people who don't have dryers, and I know they'll dry laundry on their porches if the weather is even remotely hospitable to that, but when it isn't, I don't know any of them well enough to ask!

At some point, about now, flannel sheets make me itch, but never in the winter. Doesn't make sense but there it is. One thing I noted about the sateen weave sheets last night was that they didn't feel cold on my skin, just smooth and soft. I might try a higher count for my next pair.

I've been seeing Jersey sheets for sale. Are they as warm as flannel or...?

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I've had jersey sheets, years ago. They're as soft as flannel, not as warm in summer, but they're a huge PITA to wash, dry and fold. It's whether you feel the comfort is worth the maintenance as compared to other fabrics, I think.

The folding part, who cares? Now that I store my sheets in pull out baskets on rollers, under my bed, they get smashed in there, and that's it. I hate folding sheets! DH can do it perfectly, but folding a fitted sheet seems like an act of torture to me. And wrinkles? Again, no one is going to see it, so I just don't care. Of course, I am the person who would rather take something to the dry cleaner than have to iron...
Oak, my grandmother did not have a dryer in her home. In the winter, she hung the clothes on lines, all strung around the basement. She had to go outside to access the basement, what a pain! I hated sleeping over her house, because when she did the laundry would be all stiff and itchy from being hung out to dry on the line or in the basement.

Folding fitted sheets is easy.

1. Match all the corners.

2. Roll into a ball and put in linen closet or basket.

:D

I like your style Snapdragen!

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Originally Posted by snapdragen

Folding fitted sheets is easy.

1. Match all the corners.

2. Roll into a ball and put in linen closet or basket.

:D

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:) :) :)

As I get older, I'm becoming more lazy. Fitted sheet it is. Years ago, I would carefully fold the corners of flat sheet and tuck it in neatly so that it didn't have any wrinkles. Must be my engineer side.

One of my cats have an allergy to down feathers. She insists on sleeping on my king size down pillow when its reasonably warm or under my down comforter in the winter. Poor thing has constant runny eyes. But I guess she prefers the soft pillow for her bed. I guess its a body pillow to her. She let me rest my head on a corner of the king size pillow. What I do for my kitties.

Ha! Yeah, folding is the least of it (though my OCD self is much happier since I learned the technique for folding fitted sheets that involves tucking each corner into the last ;) ). It's more that, you know how T-shirts act in the washer and dryer, well imagine a T-shirt the size of a queen sized fitted sheet. In the washer it turns into a sodden lump, gets imbalanced and I'm lucky if it doesn't pop the door and spill water all over the floor. In the dryer, if I'm using it, you have to open it up and shake the sheets out at least every 10-15 minutes, or they'll still be sodden lumps at the end of an hour.

You know, now that you say this, I know I am not crazy for continually asking my cleaning people to not roll the sheets up in a ball to bring them down to the washer. No matter how much I shake them out, they never dry! I never in my life rolled my sheets up when I took them off of the bed. I know this is a first world issue, but I thought I was nuts over this

Yup, washing bedlinens (or clothes) without a dryer. We've never had one, but have always had a rack of damp something hanging around :-D Now we have a house big enough that it's not in the way, but it's still nice when spring rolls around and we can dry stuff outdoors.
Most people do have dryers, I guess, I just never really felt the need. But we do have a large drying cabinet that we use occasionally if we have clothes that are soaked.
When I grew up it was usual to see communal drying racks outside apartment buildings, usually with a tall wire fence around and gated.

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Originally Posted by lph

but it's still nice when spring rolls around and we can dry stuff outdoors.

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That is making me miss the old family house near Gordes and the summer lavender scented line dried sheets (the reason I like a lavender sachet bedside now)….and an old Godin wood stove in the laundry room for warm ones in the winter! We always hung/rack/line dried as I was growing up in France. Still do for some of my clothes.

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Originally Posted by rebeccaC

That is making me miss the old family house near Gordes and the summer lavender scented line dried sheets (the reason I like a lavender sachet bedside now)….and an old Godin wood stove in the laundry room for warm ones in the winter! We always hung/rack/line dried as I was growing up in France. Still do for some of my clothes.

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I love Gordes and that whole area! What a wonderful place to grow up.

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Originally Posted by salsabike

I love Gordes and that whole area! What a wonderful place to grow up.

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Mostly in the Grenoble area (Lycee years in Paris with one year in a Quebec girls school cuz i was kinda wild :)) but we would spend summer and winter vacations in the Gordes home…it’s been in my fathers family since the 18th century…..and yeah it’s a wonderful area!!! I luv staying there and bicycling now!

I stayed in Gordes for 2 nights last June. It was a wonderful area.

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Originally Posted by Crankin

the laundry would be all stiff and itchy from being hung out to dry

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It wasn't until I started moving between a home with very hard water, and a home with very soft water, and hanging my wash to dry at both, that it occurred to me how those types of water got their names! I've never looked it up, but it seems an obvious guess.

Maybe... I know the water here is hard, because whenever I've moved to a place with "soft" water, my hair gets even more difficult than it normally is!

Feeling so old...

Went out to dinner tonight with a friend 13 years my junior. The waitress comped us both a glass of Amontillado and I remarked it was my first time having this drink but I remember the name well for having read "The Cask of Amontillado" in junior high. Both the waitress and my friend looked at me like I had a third head, neither one having heard of the story before. While I didn't love lit in school, it was certainly something I remembered. Cheers to being an old fogey.

Ha! I think it's more some kids are into Poe and some just aren't. I'm pretty sure I'm a good bit older than you are? but I remember a time from high school, when some of the middle school kids for some reason started building a wall with those cardboard bricks, across the hallway of the science building. I stood behind it and hollered, "For the love of God, Montrésor!" The only person who got it was one of the teachers. :D (A science teacher too, not an English teacher.)

I taught that story in 7th grade English for years. But, as we moved from using anthologies to real literature, it went by the wayside.

Most of what I remember from seventh grade English is: A short story must have a conflict. It can be a conflict between man and nature, man and man, or man and himself. To which I always added: Women are not permitted in short stories except as the object of the conflict.


But, I don't remember reading "The Cask of Amontillado" in school. "The Tell-Tale Heart," I'm pretty sure we did.

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Originally Posted by OakLeaf

Most of what I remember from seventh grade English is: A short story must have a conflict. It can be a conflict between man and nature, man and man, or man and himself. To which I always added: Women are not permitted in short stories except as the object of the conflict.

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Ha!! Good one.

I remember being "assigned" to the library for PE and recess for two years when I was in a wheelchair and using crutches when I was a kid. The librarian saw a crushed spirit as I was a wildly active kid, but she talked with me and actually listened and started steering me towards books far above my level, she helped me let my mind run free even though my body couldn't, she introduced me to some amazing literature... sure made english classes fun from that point on.

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Originally Posted by Crankin

I taught that story in 7th grade English for years. But, as we moved from using anthologies to real literature, it went by the wayside.

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I bristle at the thought of "using anthologies to real literature" Surely, Edgard Allen Poe will disagree. Perhaps it was the kerosene lamp in his living quarters that gave rise to many of his nightmarish stories.

So would real literature be something from Jane Austin? And would Canterbury tale be considered novellas since it is a collection of stories of characters from different background? Sometimes, serious literature leaves me dry: Die Brechtrommel and Der Butt. Never could get into Gunter Grass. didn't care for Oskar nor the fish nor the story of Awa. German literature is rife with anti-heros. It's a common theme. Same goes for Dickenson. Oh the dread of Nicholas Nickleby.

But I do like some light reading like Mist of Avalon. It was a tale from woman's perspective on King Arthur to something more classical like The Tempest from Shakespear.

So why is Romeo and Juliet so much a standard and same with The Taming of Shrew while Midsummer Night's Dream and (more so with) The Tempest are left in the dust?

Calm down, Smiling Cat. When I say anthology, I mean a book that is full of either short stories or *abridged* versions of novels or non fiction. Up until around 1990, it was less common for kids to read lots of real books, not abridged versions. I taught a short story unit as part of my Language Arts class, but for 6th and 7th graders, it tended to be more contemporary authors (Sandra Cisceros comes to mind). Since what we were reading was always connected to what we were writing, that was also a consideration. So was the content of their Social Studies class. In addition to 4 whole class novels and a short story unit, my kids read at least one independent reading book (some read 10) a month, wrote 4 writing pieces in different genres, did a research paper, had a hands on project to present for each writing piece, kept a writing journal, and 7th graders performed A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I just returned home from a conference in Denver where something rather scary happened. Fortunately it wasn't real, but WE didn't know that! The hotel slipped in not telling the conference staff and I'm sure that someone got in trouble for it. They certainly should have.

Tuesday morning I was in my selected session and we were all having a good discussion. Then all of a sudden we heard LOTS of screaming voices, to my ears it sounded more like children than adults, but it sounded like a large crowd. THEN we heard shots! We were all in shock at this point and were looking at each other. At that point many of us tried to find a place to hide in the room - there really wasn't any "diving for cover" as there wasn't any. I (and others) ducked behind a column behind the screen on which a powerpoint presentation was projected. Someone was calling out for someone to barricade the door. At some point, I really don't know how, we got the news that it wasn't real. We were all rather shaky after that and the shock lasted for a time.

As it turned out, there is a dinner mystery theatre group that sometimes has events at our conference hotel and they were practicing right next door. Thier style is to present events that are current rather than an old-fashioned "who-done-it" and, these days, with so many mass shootings they do present those. Personally I find that rather shocking that people would pay to see a mass shooting enacted for dinner but obviously I am not their target client. Someone on the hotel staff neglected to let our conference organizers know so they could warn us.

I'm a bit surprised that none of us thought to call 911 with an active shooter emergency - and thankfully we didn't have an attendee who happened to be carrying - things could have turned out rather differently given how realistically it all sounded. Afterwards I ran across one of the waitor/actors on a potty break and he was very apologetic, they thought we had been told.

No harm done outside of raising our cortisol levels - and the rest of the conference went off without a hitch :-) One interesting outcome of the experience, I was far more patient going through security at the Denver airport yesterday on the way home. Things can happen fast, real or not.

That is really interesting, Catrin. I always enjoy seeing how people react when extreme stimulus is introduced (especially when it's innocuous), after years as a cop/firefighter/medic I go calm and cool, almost icy, so it's strange to watch others get jumpy or panicky or just freeze.

Sorry you had to deal with it though, in this day and age it's unnerving to say the least.

Oh geez Catrin, yeah, that could have turned out VERY badly (and not knowing who all was at your conference or elsewhere in the venue that might have overheard, someone could have gotten very badly triggered and you might not know). That's unbelievable to me that they wouldn't warn people - when emergency services do a drill, there are notices in the papers and on the radio for days beforehand. So sorry you had to go through it.

Catrin, this just proves my current theory on the intelligence level of most people. Oy. Sorry you had to endure this. I am mostly like Pax, I go calm and cold in an emergency and get very business like and efficient. Of course, I've never been in a shooting, but people are often surprised that i am so calm. On the other hand, I get anxious at more normal things...
Talking about my teaching practice above made me feel good; I did a lot with those kids and it was mostly fun. This week is Teacher Appreciation Week and one of my former colleagues posted a tribute to exceptional educators on FB. I was tagged; while I don't regret my career change at all, I still feel pretty bonded to those people. I also have been building quite a few teachers into my practice, which I am really enjoying. They all are in counseling for very different reasons, but a lot of it is work related.

I am also one of those people who become icy calm in emergencies, but then fall apart afterwards (once it is safe to do so) as a couple serious life-threatening experiences over the years have shown me. I seemed to get back to normal pretty quickly, but my 25-year old co-worker who was in the same room with me was terrified and he really didn't appear to be back to himself until the next day and that went for many in that room. Of course, sometimes we think we are back to ourselves and aren't. I do get quite anxious for more usual stressors/situations - and it seems to take a very high level of stress to cause me to flip reaction modes. Probably something to do with survival. Very thankful that things worked out as they did and I'm sure the Denver Embassy Suites will change how they let people know when they have other practices/events like that one.

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Originally Posted by Crankin

Catrin, this just proves my current theory on the intelligence level of most people. Oy.

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+1

I'm glad it wasn't real.

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Originally Posted by VeganBikeChick

Feeling so old...

Went out to dinner tonight with a friend 13 years my junior. The waitress comped us both a glass of Amontillado and I remarked it was my first time having this drink but I remember the name well for having read "The Cask of Amontillado" in junior high. Both the waitress and my friend looked at me like I had a third head, neither one having heard of the story before. While I didn't love lit in school, it was certainly something I remembered. Cheers to being an old fogey.

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Yup. At choir practice last week we were doing warm up exercises, and our 28 yr old conductor wanted us to sing "the Jello song, you know, the advertising jingle for Jello" (well, the norwegian equivalent).

Some of us old fogies didn't know it, so she hummed it for us. We all started smiling as it was pretty easy. Otherwise known as "Blue Moon".