the funny thing is, my bed here is a third larger than my last bed…

Here I am in beautiful sunny Portland, OR, sitting at the edge of my bed, at a computer desk which is much more accommodating than my old computer desk, my bed being, as mentioned in the blog title, a third larger than my old bed. I’ll always be one step ahead of you in the bed department, Aaron Kiefer. One step ahead…

I had to leave earlier than I thought, not realizing the impact of the Democratic National Convention on my brother Russ, and his extreme need to get back home in time to do his radio show (which is live on Saturdays … it’s 12 to 2 here, and I think you can hear it on KPOJ.com). So during Obama’s speech on Thursday night, he was driving from Denver to Boise, and ended up getting to my parents house at about 11am. I was in Boise giving plasma. My night of fun and frivolity ruined, I would be damned before I left without getting my precious blood money. Also I left my eyeglasses at the Dorian House and had to pick them up. Afterwards I managed to eek out a lunch date with my friend Megan, who is a most ambitious person and was able to essentially be the last person I saw in Boise before I left. That was about 3pm.

I got to my parents house and was immediately whisked away into Russ’s car, where we took the long, somewhat boring drive through eastern Oregon up to the Columbia Gorge, which is very pretty, and finally into Portland. I drove most of the way while Russ and Karri (I guess I haven’t mentioned Karri yet, have I? Well, she’s awesome and she lives in Astoria, which is equally awesome) slept. The drive to Portland is great, but once I’m in the city I lose all concept of what it means to be in a vehicle. I had to go around a roundabout; there is only one roundabout in the entire Treasure Valley and it’s like a kiddie roundabout. Anyway, I frightened Russ a couple of times with my ineptitude. We got in about 9pm, watched a bit of Obama’s speech (tivo’d) and went to sleep. Oh, and once I got to the house I realized that in the fervor to get out on the road, I forgot all my stuff in the bathroom — contact solution, toothbrush, etc. So that sucked.

Today was an adventure day. I got up at 10, walked to Walgreens, and marveled at the sheer amount of stuff a couple of blocks from my house. A park right across the street; a Burgerville(!) at the corner; a Wendy’s further down the way; a Walgreens, a Safeway, a Subway, a … some other things. It was great. And the weather couldn’t be nicer. So I went to Walgreens to buy all the stuff I forgot in Boise (they didn’t have contact cases, by the way, so I had to buy a little bottle and a case with it. Stupid). When I came back it was time for Russ’s radio show. I’ve heard it through the interwebs before but I’ve never sat in on it. Needless to say, it’s surreal, to be sitting, listening to a radio show on headphones that’s happening right then. It was a good show, cause the Sarah Palin VP thing had broken and it was essentially a hilarious decision on McCain’s part, and so there was plenty of fodder for Russ.

When the show wrapped up we took the dogs out for a walk (they are cute dogs, I will post pictures soon), and then went to Burgerville for, I dunno, burgers. I think they serve those there. They were delicious. Once we got back, though, it was time for the grand Moving of Bedrooms!

You see, Russ and his wife (I dunno if she’s big on the “name on the internet for all to see” sort of thing, so I’ll leave it out for now) had their bedroom on the ground floor of this house. It’s right next to the bathroom, and it meant less time hauling laundry up to the second floor. But eventually they realized that the upstairs bedroom was the master bedroom (well, I mean, they knew that but, yeah) and so when I moved in they wanted to switch bedrooms with me. I don’t blame them; the upstairs has a little office and nice closet space and another room that’s just an unifinished part of the attic or something, it’s weird, but either the office or offshoot room would make excellent writing/music recording rooms, and so naturally by the grace of fate I would not be allowed to use them.

Okay. So first we move my bed downstairs. My bed is a queen? King? I dunno, but it’s supported by two single box springs. Don’t know why. We moved it and set it aside in the kitchen, while we prepared to move Russ’s bed upstairs. We strip the bed, move everything aside, and start hauling the box spring up the small staircase.

And it gets stuck. And not like, hey, we can muscle this stuck. I mean the “if we move this any more we’ll break something” stuck. This box spring was not meant to go up these stairs.

Now, Russ has one intolerable quality that is a quality of all Belville’s, and it is Stubbornness. When we get it in our heads that we’re going to do something, then by god we are going to do it. And it was decided by the two of us (not by his wife that much) that we were going to get this bed into the upstairs. We tried muscling, we tried alternate angles, we tried removing the door to the stairs so we could come in from the kitchen. We tried everything. That box spring would not budge.

At this point there were two thought processes: one, that we saw the box spring in half, and two, that we remove the moulding from the door to give us an inch or two of extra room. Another qualtiy that Russ and I have is that we sometimes have stupid ideas that do not conform to common sense. Granted, I have more than he does (like when he gave me this computer desk. I set it up and for some reason put it somewhat in front of the closet. Russ came in and said, “Will that desk work?” and I said, “Yeah, it’s kind of in front of the closet but that’s okay,” and he said, “Why don’t you move it away from the closet?” and I said, “Uhhh, yeah, good idea.”), but every rare once and a while we both get the same stupid idea, and that stupid idea was to remove the moulding. Russ’s wife went along with it, too, because she knew Russ’s stubbornness (though has not been privy to mine), and so before you knew it, they were tearing moulding off the doorframe.

About a third of the way into the process it became clear that this was a Bad Idea, but they were already doing it and so eventually the mould was off and we could see the doorframe. Russ tried to hammer the doorframe out of its place but it was cemented in there and would not budge. But we thought, Hey, we have a couple of inches now! So we took the box spring and started pushing it up the stairs…

And it got stuck. On the next step. In roughly the same place.

At this point Russ was pissed, his wife was desperate to get some sleep (she worked the night shift), and I was secretly hoping that they would opt to leave their bed downstairs so I could get the kickass upstairs all to myself. But the Belville Stubbornness does not dwindle when faced with such a dilemma; nay, rather, it grows tenfold, like a hydra who just had one head cut off, three more grow in its place.

We briefly assayed the idea of hauling the box spring through an upstairs window, but they were all too small. Perhaps, we thought, we could remove the stairs and get it up there. Too much work. And then we got back on the idea of sawing the fucking thing in half. This seemed risky because we were afraid of disturbing the springs. But after some pawing of the mattress itself (is it technically a mattress? I never know), we realized that there weren’t any springs in there at all, just a simple latticework of wood supports. So Russ and I were like, fuck it, let’s saw it in half. We spent ten minutes taking the staples out of the fabric part, and then Russ got his saw and he sawed the thing in half. To be honest, it was pre
tty awesome. And then we folded the box spring in half (sans springs, apparently), and it was much easier to get up the stairs.

Once we got it up there, though, having had some previous experience sawing things in half in tech class and the need to put them together for stability, I realized that we would need something to put the wood back together, or else maybe one night Russ and his wife are sleeping and Russ turns over and suddenly the whole damn thing caves in. That would be bad. So I suggested we get some small 1×4 pieces of wood or something we could screw into the wood to put them back together. We ended up going to Home Depot, getting metal joiners, and screwing them into the box spring, making Russ’s bed look like a weird Frankensteinian monster.

Then we brought his regular mattress up and while it took a bit of muscling, it was much easier to get up there than his box spring. And then of course I unloaded all of my stuff in the downstairs bedroom, and everything is copasetic now. I’m still getting over the fact that it’s an hour earlier here than Boise, and that I don’t know anyone here (yet), but I’m already having a blast, and Russ’s wife has a contact in the theatre, and if all else fails I can go busk down on Hawthorne street, which might be fun, actually.

Anyway, it’s late, and I’m going to attempt to put a fitted bedsheet on a bed that is too large for said bedsheet, but somehow had said bedsheet on said bed before we moved it downstairs. Goodnight!