A Terrier Hears Horton, or cpap with varmints

This year, for our fifteenth anniversary, Mr Moth and I treated ourselves to a new bed.  After years of being all Dan and Roseanne in a double bed, we went for the king, even though it pretty much eats up all the floor space in our room.  Mr Moth gladly gave up floor space on his side in favor of more sleeping space.  I can’t, because doing so would leave me unable to open the drawers on my dresser, and of course we had to have room for dogs.

The bed is amazing, wonderful, awesome.  We have so much less pain–bordering on none.  I still have my beloved familial bursitis, but pretty much nothing else hurts when I get up in the morning (unless it’s my head, which is either apnea, sinus, or both).  Mr Moth was able to stop wearing his knee braces, of which he has two.  One being for his actual knee, and the other being one of those sold-on-tv things for back pain.

Yes, that actually worked, right up until he didn’t need it anymore.

To save floor space, we went with a bedframe that has no headboard and no footboard.

Dealing with lack of storage was an issue, but more serious to me–hello, Crazy Dog Lady–was discovering the new bed was too high for Kelly.  She used to use the tiny footboard as a toehold and come up over the end, but now she was just grounded.  Furthermore, Cobie was being a giant territorial ass about it, jumping up on the bed and prancing around, lording it over her.

I surfed the internet extensively looking for ideas, but didn’t really find anything that appealed.  While it seemed an obvious solution, there’s no longer enough room in the bedroom for some of those doggy steps, and I think I may have already reported how the bedding I thought was going to fit the new bed did not.  We went to Ollie’s looking for a bedding set that would fit, and when I saw one of those storage ottomans one of my remaining braincells fired off, and I thought aha!  And we got one.

The ottoman fits barely on Mr Moth’s side of the bed.  It gives him a place to charge his phone while he sleeps, and provides a place to stash clutter where I don’t have to look at it.  One turned out to not quite be enough, because Kelly is longer than one ottoman, so we bought another.  The arrangement might look a little odd, but it fulfills all the requirements.

(My own phone charging arrangement is even odder because of the need to keep the dresser unblocked on my side, but that is perhaps a topic for another day.)

So fast forward to Project Horton.  Someone on FaceBook suggested that Cobie, my spooky dog, might be alarmed by the CPAP machine.  I tried not to worry about that, but I worried about it a lot.  He doesn’t do well with change.  If I even change my text message alert tone, he spends days running to the basement every time it goes off until he gets used to it.  When I was setting up Horton, both dogs watched, and Cobie actually jumped up on the bed, so I showed it to him.  He sniffed it for a long while, then went and laid down on his bed.  Kelly was completely disinterested and entertained herself my licking my pillow.

Then, at some point on Day Two, after Mr Moth had gone to work, Kelly climbed her ottomen–haha–and got into bed with me.  She hadn’t done that on the first night I wore the mask, but some nights she doesn’t.  She kept her distance, although that is also not unusual.  Oliver (the cat) has a “territory” on the bed, and even when he isn’t in it, neither dog is anxious to infringe.  If you knew Oliver, you’d understand.

At some point, Oliver joined the bedzoo.  At yet another point, the mask resumed its leaking and farting*.

Kelly went wild.

She started yarking and charging my face, and Tiggering all around the bed.  Oliver was displeased.  He squalled like a ninja.  Kelly bounced and yarked and went gromma gromma gromma.

I lay there thinking about Elmer Fudd and the fly in his bedroom and how one little distraction escalates until he ends up blowing holes all in his house with a shotgun.  That always seemed ridiculous to me before.

Now, not so much.

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    *  Since Zor’s childhood, we have called blowing razzberries on someone’s belly a “zerbert” because at some point she saw it spelled on a cartoon as ZRRBRRRT.  Among classier people this farting/razzberrying is also called burping, and I am ridiculously glad that my family and other people’s families (as reported on forums) notice how hideously loud it is.  People in other rooms can hear this.  Ergo I can conclude I am not being a princess about it.  It is a thing.  A nerve-wracking obnoxious thing.

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