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I have mentioned before that I have a special bed, approved for helping to heal persistent wounds. The bed looks a bit weird, but what you can't see is stranger yet. It is a bed of very fine sand, or rather fake sand made out of beads of silicone, through which hot air blows upward. The manufacturer exhorted us to keep the bed running 24/7, despite the effect on our electric bill. We might have gone with that, except for two reasons. The main reason is that the bed continually heats the room, and in the warm part of the year, the room quickly becomes too hot to permit human life. Of course, subzero temperatures outside can make this heating effect highly desirable. The other reason to turn the bed off is that in operation it is noisy.

I wrote a haiku yesterday mentioning that a miniature Sahara was on the floor by the bed, because it had started to leak. We* fixed the bed, or so we thought, but this morning use of the word miniature no longer seems appropriate. There are at least 10 gallons of sand on the floor of the bedroom. If we can't fix the bed this time, by the end of the day we will have to empty out what amounts to a dozen large buckets of sand, remove that from the bedroom, take the bed apart and get it out of there, bring in our old bed and set it up, and hope that the old air mattress is good enough to at least keep my health from suffering too much before something better can be done. I know how much sand is in there, because I watched the guys fill it one time.

The situation is actually more complicated. Not only is it a holiday weekend, which means that it will be difficult to get in touch with anybody, but the company that made and sold the bed has apparently itself been sold. They are no longer willing to send a technician as far from their new home base in North Carolina as Louisiana. People have already been trying, so far without success, to find another company that would work with us on this particular piece of equipment. So even if we** can fix the bed today, and even if it stays fixed for more than a day or two, there remains the long-term problem of maintenance and repair. We may have to toss it and replace it with something similar.

The beads are plastic, so it's not like we can dump them in the compost pile. And they're heavy. I guess we could throw the stuff away a little bit at a time with the garbage. That would only take three or four months.

oy veh!


*We=my multitalented wife.

**Still my long-suffering wife.