I love my bed. It has a very comfy mattress, pillows with depth, a serene blue comforter in a pattern of pleats so you can’t see that it’s wrinkled, and an adorable dog to curl up next to me (that’s not my prejudice, strangers call him adorable all the time). It’s the perfect place to read, work on my laptop, drink Diet Coke, and have significant conversations with Johnny. Equally good is my mission couch which has all the same things. I think it’s important to stretch out several times a day and appreciate the power of a good bed/couch/nap. My bed makes me happy.
So how did you stretch for happiness this week?
81 Responses
I also love my bed. I can’t sit up to write in it for any length of time, but I do love to lie here all warm and cozy and read or go online.
I had to work after being off since Christmas, but it’s a decent job and my coworkers are great and funny. My kid’s back for her last semester of senior year and she’s kind of gritting her teeth to get through it right now, but she’s going to make it.
And we’re all healthy.
Studies suggest that naps contribute to longevity! I sleep in a recliner. I am most comfortable there. Recently I replaced the one I’d been sleeping on for 6 years with a brand new one & now I super love it.
A new coffee place opened close to us; Dutch Brothers. It is a really good place for a treat. They have a drink called a Kicker; espresso, Irish Cream syrup (sugarfree for me) & it comes with steamed 1/2 & 1/2 but I get steamed 2 % milk instead. Yum!
Asking for a friend: what kind of recliner ? Does it raise and lower, have armrests, etc.
Jenny sorry to double dip but I keep forgetting to say – I love the new look!
What double dip? This is a conversation. Have at it.
Because of my chronic illness, I’ve been napping most days for over 40 years, and it’s the only way I function. Happiness is definitely a comfy bed. I am one of the few remaining people with a waterbed, and it’s lovely getting into the warmth and coziness, especially in the winter. The cats love it too. Happiness is definitely a bed filled with cats.
This week’s happiness is finding out that the rodents I’ve been hearing running in the ceiling and walls of my old farmhouse are just mice (not unusual) and not rats (they were SO loud). What can I say–the bar is set low for happiness here. I still have to get rid of them, but I can handle that.
After a cold and snowy December and early January, we are having a brief thaw. It hit 40 yesterday. It won’t last, but it makes me happy while it’s here.
I very much second the bed-full-of-cats-thing!
Has the heater ever gone out on your waterbed? I had one a thousand years ago (okay, maybe not a thousand, but it was two husbands ago and I’ve been married to this one for 28 years) and I recall an unheated waterbed as the coldest cold I’ve ever experienced, and I lived in St. Paul for a while.
Once or twice. I have a spare heater just in case, but if the power goes out, I’m screwed.
I had a ermine in my bedroom last winter: white with a long, long body. Though I’m not normally afraid and have shared my home with mice most of my life, it kind of freaked me out.I went on line and the first article that turned up was about an ermine/stoat who bit off the face of a sleeping old man in a small town in Wales. Yikes!
You should put the cats to work. I bet at least one of them is a mouser.
The cats will definitely dispose of any mouse stupid enough to come out into their territory. (Oh, the stories I could tell…) Sadly, the current mice are in the walls, ceilings, mudroom, and basement, where the cats can’t go. And apparently have no interest in the peanut butter I am using as bait in the mouse traps. Sigh.
A friend of mine swears by Snickers bars in the mouse traps.
My bed is my favourite piece of furniture… it only took 40 years and a dozen meh mattresses to find the one that’s just right… and guess what… it came rolled up, vacuum packed in a box 🤯
I miss waterbeds. If the heater is turned off in summer, they are lovely and cool.
I love that I can lower and raise the temps, depending on the time of year.
Add me to the “love my bed” brigade. I can raise the head or foot. The mattress isn’t the best, it came from Amazon in a tight roll and took a day to expand. I tend to nap, too.
I like my bed and miss it when I am on vacation, but what made me happy this week was issuing W2s (4) and 1099s (8) and doing the annual MI sales tax/withholding report. With so few people, it is not that much data entry, but it is important to do it right, so always glad when it is done.
I’ll be doing T4’s this week, and I too will be glad to get them done!
I love my bed, too. It’s firm and comfortable, and it’s especially great at this time of year, when I use the flannel sheets and the heavy wool comforter — so cozy to snuggle under.
Although here in Georgia, winter isn’t always winter. The temps were up in the high sixties last week, which is crazy. Now we’re in winter again. I had a lovely brisk walk this morning — sunny and cold with a touch of chilly wind.
I have a memory foam mattress, which is great. I like thin pillows, and IKEA has one that is perfect. I usually buy several and unroll a new one when I need to. Flannel sheets and a down comforter make such a difference in winter!
I’m much better today, and very glad to be recovering from this flu. It’s wonderful to finally have a morning when it doesn’t feel like my legs are going to collapse under me while I’m walking or standing. My cats came back last night, so I knew I was getting better. I had a nice snuggle with one. Kali went into her crate on her own last night and waited for her treat. She barks when the cats jump on the bed, when she’s not in her crate.
I would love a Mission sofa! Where did you get yours, Jenny? I was lucky enough to find a recliner with wood arms and sides last year. They don’t make furniture with exposed wood, anymore. I like it, because there’s no material for the cats to scratch on the front of the arms. It also takes up less room than the overstuffed furniture.
A furniture store in Columbus, Ohio, when I was in grad school, so it was decades ago. Never regretted buying it even though I ate peanut butter for a while to afford it. It’s the greatest couch ever.
Johnny is adorable, and Mooncake agrees that hanging out in bed on weekend mornings is the best thing (he’ll actually lead me down the hallway while I’m making my tea etc.).
Our bed is okay; probably time for a new one but we can’t really afford one because of how expensive New Year’s was, ha. ha. I may invest in a topper though because the hotel bed I had in Osoyoos was softer on top but still supportive, and my arm didn’t fall asleep as much.
What made me happy this week is my new car. I was BITTER about having to buy a new one before I really wanted to, but I’m not gonna lie: it’s pretty sweet. 2026 Outback, and I’m in the 2020’s now with features, as my husband pointed out.
(Recap from last Sunday: 2010 Outback broke down fatally before New Year’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s still in another town, had to rent a car to continue trip and get home.)
I did a similar jump in technology of about 15 years with my car in the late 2010s. To this day I’m finding features I hadn’t known about, and it’s by now far from the cutting edge of tech.
I thought switching to an electric vehicle would be challenging due to the different engines, but the real challenge was, like with your new car, with the upgrade in features. I think my jump was about the same as yours, although mine is barely into the 2020s (2021). I’ve had it for over a year now, and I just realized I have no idea how to fold down the back seats to make room for a large item in the hatchback. And it took me about 9 months to realize why the speedometer kept suggesting that I set the speed warning. (Not a big deal on local roads, but on the highway, it’s really hard to notice when you’ve accelerated beyond an acceptable margin above the speed limit, because it’s so quiet.) The various beeps and buzzes can be annoying, but I do love the backup camera and the blind spot warnings in the side mirrors.
Backup cameras are one of the top 10 inventions of all time. Especially if you have a long driveway.
Or an arthritic neck. I can’t wait to get one, although I don’t want to give up my present vehicles. Why can’t they be installed after-market? (grumble)
I have a 2020 and I love the backup camera and the blind spot warnings. I don’t need much in the way of features but those make me happy.
I still have soooo much to learn!
Heated steering wheels are right up there with the backup camera!
And heated seats!!!
I would love the heated seats (my BIL adores the cooling seats too). But I’ve rented cars with some features already turned on, and I hate some of them. Like the lane departure warning – shaking my steering wheel yikes! – and the “heads up display” of the speed limit. The dumb thing doesn’t know that the school zone signs don’t apply at 10pm!
My bed is very comfortable—hard IKEA latex mattress topped with memory foam. It’s my perfect combo. I also have a memory foam pillow that keeps my neck straight and my head at the perfect height.
Happiness is making French toast on my first full day of retirement. Sunday, so it doesn’t count really, but I’m enjoying it anyway.
Congratulations, Karen B!
Retirement is fantastic!
Congratulations on retiring! I’m a bit jealous. 😊
All the days count! I am semi-retired and I now make waffles once a week. (A minimum of four days off. More now, during the slow season.)
My happy was waking up to a fresh sheet of snow outside and a sunny day. Everything looks so much nicer with brilliantly white nature.
We managed to go on a little walk but sadly the sun was hiding by then.
Still, the cold did our son good whose cheek is still swollen after 2 of his wisdom theeth were extracted last week. Poor brave guy.
I’m glad I had all 4 of them extracted when it was my turn. I loked like an greedy chipmunk with overstuffed cheeks for quite some time, but at least I didn’t have to look forward to another round to get the last 2 out.
Barnes and Noble seem to have leaked some very nice news from one of my fav authors (on whose tv adaptation I’m still kind of hooked). No official note yet but I really hope that kiddo and I can look forward to late September for new reading material.
As I recall, the advantage to having your wisdom teeth extracted in 2 stages is that you still have one side of your mouth that you can use while the other side is healing. And by the second time, you’ve learned some strategies for coping with the limitation of having stitches in your mouth.
Oh, the swelling is impressive enough that eating is not much fun.
But yes, if eating us that difficult now, it would probably be almost impossible with both sides swollen.
We’ll try the ananas/pineapple diet next time – one of kiddo’s friends swears on it. She seems to have had very little swelling.
Dodo, Best wishes to your suffering offspring. My wisdom teeth are long gone, but I’ve had multiple extractions of once useful teeth more recently and the stitches are no fun!
Just to perfect your nearly perfect English, as far as I can determine, the only meaning of ananas in English is as the genus name for pineapple and related plants. I hadn’t realized it was an English word at all; pineapple is just pineapple, despite what ananas means in many other languages; it’s not a situation like eggplant vs aubergine.
Thanks for the wishes for the kid, Patrick.
Now I wonder about the aubergine/eggplant situation. For me, it’s always the former, as it’s what I’m used to.
You probably refer to aubergine (UK) to eggplant (US)?
Dodo, Yes, it’s a US/UK thing, or rather a US plus CAN plus AUS et al vs UK et al thing, per Wictionary
Huh. I had assumed ananas was a typo and that Dodo had meant bananas. My mistake.
Hope the swelling goes down quickly!
In my family the time after tooth extraction is the only time you can have milkshakes every day. I only wish I could have waited until
My family swore by unlimited milkshakes. However even that wasn’t enough when I went back to work at the greasy spoon and one of the regular customers took one look at my bruised face and said,”What’s the matter? Did your boyfriend hit you?” I NOT amused.
Aunt snack, that was a cruel commentary by that customer!!
I’m not familiar how someone looks after getting hit, but a wisdom tooth swelling is really something else. One of my son’s buddy’s got all 4 extracted and the swelling wouldn’t go away for more than two weeks. My son told me he also looked like he was smiling all the time. Poor guy.
And Kelly S., thank you!
The swelling is slooooowly going down. I really hope that the kid feels like going out on Friday when we’ve got tickets for our team’s hockey game. I snatched tickets for right behind the guest bench. We won’t have a great overall view (too close to the ice) but I’m excited anyway. Four of our team’s former mates will be sitting on that bench…
Dear Dodo,
The comment wasn’t nearly as bad as you imagined. I had had the other side of my mouth done 3 weeks earlier so all the regulars knew what was going on. This time, however, the dentist had not put enough packing around the hole and it continued to ooze. So we all had to come in on Saturday to have it repacked and stitched on our day off. I had a small bruise running down from my lip where the dentist pulled my cheek way back to insure that he hadn’t missed any potential leaks the second time. It didn’t really hurt, but it did look a little sinister when I came back to work on Monday.
I love my bed. Sleep experts says using bed for sleep rather than reading, watching movies, etc. can improve sleep. Some nights it’s hard to resist the siren call of my comfy bed. I also have a huge, very comfortable sofa in the family room and a smaller live seat in the living room. It’s in front of the gas fire place which is a lovely spot to read in the colder months (since I live in Eastern Ontario, that’s several months).
I found out mid-week that I need significant work done on two teeth. Still waiting on details but since anything dental makes me very anxious, I had trouble getting near any happiness thus week. I did have a long telephone chat with one of my favourite cousins and found out another favourite cousin is attending our uncle’s memorial at the end of the month. Plus, DS and I got the last 2 years of his tax information sorted out – all printed and ready to be filed with DH and my taxes from 2024. Will be goid to get all that sorted out before 2025 tax season.
Whoever said that about not reading in bed maybe isn’t lying but they can shush about it.
And f*ck right off.
Actually, that’s the only other thing “they” recommend to do in a bed beside sleeping. 😏
And sex, I hope!
I should be so lucky.
I woke up this morning with a sore throat. With that I scrounged around in the medicine cabinet for lozenges I half remembered that were there. I’m not saying I don’t periodically clean the cabinet out but sometimes I hang on to things. Well, I found the cough drops and glanced at the expiration date and wouldn’t you know it was 2014. That means I haven’t had a cold for twelve years. The drops still did their job after a fashion. I’m now having a lemon ginger tea hopefully to stop coughing. An ENT doctor once told me that you have to tell yourself to try not to cough to stop that reflex action. I know I did that once before and it worked. Was it really years ago?
During fall when my favorite soups were on sale I must have bought at least twenty cans of Progresso at various times. The chicken varieties I like to add wedges of lemon (and some vegetables there stingy that way) while they are heating up. You could say I’m set for winter with the addition of Campbells. Yes, I have those, too.
I love naps. Whether its sleeping for 15 minutes or an hour, it’s not like going to bed at night where there is a procedure to follow, a routine like, just flopping on the bed wrapped in a comforter and either sleeping or just resting my eyes. And waking up refreshed to continue the day.
Mary, get well soon!
If there were soup sales here in the fall, I missed them, and sticker shock has discouraged replenishment. Which is illogical, since fortunately I can afford the jacked-up prices. I’m currently out of pretty much every sort of soup except what I make starting from storebought soup base in jars (or from scratch). But canned and dried soup is on the shopping list, and we’re having a spell of warmish weather anyhow.
I do my stretching in chair yoga – which I mutter about as being for old people but secretly I love it. My husband refers to it as ‘choga’. Because he thinks he’s funny.
Choga is funny!
Bed happiness for me is the electric blanket. For years, I resisted getting one, thinking it wasn’t that big a deal, and I had plenty of quilts to pile on top of myself, plus some large number of cats for warming up the blankets better than a hot water bottle. I was also convinced it would be TOO warm, because I really hate it when my feet get hot. Plus, it felt wasteful.
I forget what inspired me to make the leap eventually, but it dawned on me that I could get the smallest size, a throw rather than a full blanket, which covers my core, but leaves space at the bottom of the bed for my feet to stretch out if it’s too hot underneath where the blanket covers. And I can keep the bedroom cooler, so it’s not a waste of natural resources (the blanket uses less energy than heating the whole room/house).
Happy, happy, happy.
I used to have an electric mattress pad. Best thing!
I seem to be in the minority here, but I view my bed as strictly for the sleeping function. And even though I’m old, I resent every minute of life stolen from me by sleep.
This is a format test.
Okay. In the current incarnation of the comments listing (the very curtailed box that I dissed earlier), if the commenter has a website, their name is in the same color as the topic name (Jenny’s post) and if not, it’s in black. Before, commenters with websites were underlined, aa I recall. But that will merely take getting used to.
Weird. I didn’t even notice.
We have a great bed, lots of pillows, summer quilt and wonderful very puffy down quilt for winter from Eatons. (Canadians – remember Eatons, it was a great department store, and then a hedge fund bought The Hudsons Bay and then another hedge fund bought it from the first and now we Canadians have NO department stores. Why because some asshat Canadian sold it to a hedge fund for lots and lots of money knowing that one day it would be closed and the property sold. And everyone will have to buy one line. Lots of folks miss it. Okay rant is over.).
And I made chicken soup throwing in everything leftover including the wilted kale and half a pint of whipping cream. It is so good. A creamy chicken vegetable soup. I must say it is so yummy. DH said it is the best ever too.
DH just made a little sword to replace the lost wooden sword in the authentic German nutcracker we bought in Germany about 15 years ago. He whittled a chop stick down to a miniature sword width and length. What a great guy. I asked him about 20 minutes ago. Makes me very happy. Now to get out the acrylic paints to paint it. Once dry I can put all the Christmas decorations away.
It’s the little things…a mini wooden sword and soup.
I love my bed. We bought it in 1986 and oddly enough. It is still a wonderful bed. People come over and comment on it. For Reading, I prefer a recliner and happiness is a great recliner and a hot pad. Let’s not forget that I hope you all have many joys today.
We bought our bed in … 1991? It’s a four poster that was made in the Brooklyn Navy yard. But the mattress is only 10 years old.
I cannot nap unless I am sick. But I love getting in bed at night and hate getting out in the morning.
I have been stretching, so to speak, by starting PT and taking my first out door walk for all of 18 minutes. I am allowed to add 2 minutes a day. I am making progress and trying hard to follow the rules and when I don’t I hurt…but I am getting impatient.
I also have now booked my calendar to watch figure skating at the Olympics, which will not have Jason Brown, and Worlds and the Four Continents competition, which will. Lots of bonding with DS. Between DH watching every bike race known, and figure skating, and gymnastics, we get more use out of our Peacock subscription than any other.
Debbie, I too am looking forward to watching the upcoming figure skating events. I was so disappointed that Jason had such a poor free skate; he is really much better than it looked at US Nationals!
If you have a subscription to Peacock, you can also watch the European Figure Skating Championships this week. I’m not sure if they offer the Four Continents viewing as well, but at least it will tide me over until the Olympics begin.
They do seem to offer Four Continents. Best cost per view of any subscription we have for us. (The bike racing season seems to start now and end in late fall!)
I’m not one to nap. I feel groggy when I wake up. I read a bit before but no tv or any electronics (Kindle excepted). My mattress is old but still good with a memory foam topper.
Most of my dogs have slept on the bed. My latest, Pixie, was taught to STAY OFF THE FURNITURE and does. No amount of coaxing will get her up off the floor. She even avoids dog beds. Sigh.
I am looking forward to returning to my bed. So is the dog. Surgery in December and the resulting mobility restrictions (thou shalt not twist; thou shalt not lift; thou shalt not bend) have me using a lift chair to sleep in. It’s more comfortable than I expected but it’s just not the same. Also, there’s no room for the dog in the chair.
I hope you feel better soon. I’m still in DS bed since surgery because it’s lower (poor DS had to use the pullout couch) and it’s comfy but I will be happy to get back to my own.
To follow the theme, I like my bed. We can raise/lower the head and foot. It claims massage abilities, but they are false. We also have a topper and currently are using fleece sheets, which I LOVE 💕!
There’s so much wrong with this past week, it can be hard to accept happy moments. I did celebrate a friend’s 90th birthday. Also, a skin cancer scan found none!
DH and I were talking about the bed just the other day. When we got married, we slept for a time on my old full size bed. After three months of that, we found a king size frame on Craigs List, and bought a mattress/box spring to go with it. I revel in the extra room, as do the various felines who come and pin my legs against the sheets.
DH and I also celebrated (sort of) our anniversary. 11 years officially. We’ll do a dinner date later this week, as we were in the middle of a fast on the actual day.
This weekend I moved to the new bed, queen size with a hybrid mattress and foam topper, cotton flannel sheets (so soft and *quiet*) and cotton quilt, in the room across the hall. I’ve been in a dorm room (sleep + work) since we moved in! Which has been okay. But I have to say, on the new bigger bed and with a new satin pillow style sleep mask, I have gotten three of the best nights of sleep I’ve had since we arrived.
Happy about that. 🙂
I love my bed. The mattress and pillows are perfectly comfortable and I have many many blankets at this time of year, as well as a heater in the bedroom so I can turn the heat to the rest of the house down at night. I have wanted a heated mattress pad for years, but I can’t ever make up my mind on what to get when I have the money, which isn’t often. Extra money is so much easier to spend on books.
But what I love most about my bed is that it was built by my great-great-grandfather, of cherry. My great-grandfather (b. 1860) and my grandfather were born in it. My father wasn’t since his grandparents were still sleeping in it when he was born. I have that bed, too.
I find the people who say you shouldn’t use screens before bedtime to be wrong. I love being able (when I have enough bandwidth) to watch a movie in bed. I love reading in bed on anything, but I have found since I started reading ebooks that I get drowsy reading from a screen much sooner than I do reading paper. So I keep wanting the anti-screen people to show me the details of their research.
I read print books with breakfast, but by nighttime my poor old eyes are too tired, and so I use my Kindle to read in bed before I fall asleep. It’s a lifesaver, and my only exception to the no electronics in the bedroom rule. Well, that and my sound machine.
Wow. What a lovely history for that bed.
It ought to go to a museum but I can’t afford to endow it.
Not sure if you’re joking, but it reminds me of a bit from “A Civil Campaign” when Miles tells Ekaterin that the beautiful ancient saddle was meant to be used and loved. I think it’s lovely that you sleep in a bed your great-great-grandfather built!
I have no one to leave it to–my cousins aren’t interested. And it should go to a museum only after I’m dead! It’s a piece of Kentucky history.
I also love my bed – got a new mattress, new mattress topper, new pillows, and new brushed cotton duvet sets this autumn (same divan base) for the first time in 25 years. A friend told me to get a king size duvet for a double size bed “so you don’t keep losing it” – total game changer! It is like sleeping on and under a cloud, but also so much warmer than my previous duvet, even though they are the same tog value. I spent a year crocheting myself a double bed size blanket and am now too warm to need it (sigh). It looks very pretty on the back of my sofa though.
I love my bed. I remember reading Faking It, and something about 1/2 the weight of an old pillows weight is skin cells and dust mites. My mattress and pillows all have allergen proof coverings. The pillows also have additional zippered cotton pillowcase, (the allergy cases are slippery), and a regular pillowcase. So I think of Jenny every time I wash the sheets. I also iron the sheets and the outer pillowcases once a week. I LOVE getting in bed that day.
I celebrated Good Bed Sunday with eight hours of sleep. Monday with nine. Tuesday with ten. Then I read Amyll recalling FAKING IT and the pillows. I replace my pillows roughly annually, but it’s been awhile. I need new pillows. Argh!