Lalafell Pirate Time

The Dust Ruffle

Yesterday ended up absolutely nothing like I expected.  I had a super late night recording the double episode of Aggrochat.  By the time I had edited episode one, and made my way to bed it was roughly 2 am.  I knew two things needed to happen yesterday.  Firstly we needed to deep clean the house so it would be nice for the neighbor coming down to check in on the animals, and so that we would also have a friendly home to come back to.  So after finishing my blog post I went through a whirlwind of cleaning momentum.  I cleaned the livingroom, organized all the loose paperwork deciding what needed to be kept, what needed to be shredded and what could just be pitched.  It took about an hour of serious cleaning, some of which requiring both myself and my wife working together to accomplish.  We also organized a few areas that really needed help like our “pantry” closet that is really not a pantry not a full closet.

I grabbed a monster and collapsed into my desk chair when finished with the flurry of activity, and my wife did the same out in the loft.  I had just started trying to play something when pidgin the IM client I use, started blowing up with bings and bongs.  My wife had sent me a few links to look at along with what would ultimately end up being an ominous phrase “(10:01:04 AM) : bwt, I want to go buy a bed skirt today”.  For the record I hate bed skirts, and find them both superfluous and annoying when you try and make the bed… they keep getting picked up with your covers and inadvertently tucked places.  To my wife however it is a key piece of a bed… and ours has been in pretty poor shape for a few years.  Considering that I wouldn’t really get to enjoy myself with another trip looming over my head… I suggested we go shower and get ready and go in search of said dust ruffle.

The Storage Bed

There was another footnote to this story however.  For weeks we have been throwing around the notion of a getting a storage bed.  Both my wife grew up in the era of the waterbed, and it was pretty standard for those to have a number of drawers set into the pedestal base.  This would be perfect for keeping things like socks, scarves, various sundry other bits that need a place to be.  One of my wife’s friends mentioned a store in town that she had seen some at, so we started off our trip by going over there to look.  One of the problems that we found is that right now for some reason most of these style of beds only actually have drawers in the front.  The problem with that is we do not have a massive amount of space in front of our bed.  In any case we looked around through the store, found nothing and meandered our way back to the mattresses.  During fall break we had gotten pretty close to purchasing a new bed for us, because our previous one was purchased not long after we moved into our house in 1999.

For the most part we thought the whole “every eight years” thing was a marketing ploy… but in truth after about eight years your mattress has doubled in weight from the dead skin cells you have shed…  making it a smorgasbord for dust mites.  After the guy tried to set us up with a “Bellagio” bed, we snuck away and went on about our business of trying to find the dust ruffle.  On the way across town we passed this giant Mattress Firm showroom and opted to stop in.  We had a decent experience with the folks in our local store back over fall break…  so we figured might as well see what the big location had to offer.  After playing the “lay down on all the things” process we found a bed we liked that was the store brand.  The person waiting on us was awesome, and a few customers came back in that had apparently talked to her before so she excused herself to go fill out the paperwork for their purchase.  This left me to do what I normally do and open up my phone and start googling to see what I could find out about the model and the company.

What I saw I did not like at all.  On Consumer Affairs the company as a whole had a one star rating, with huge stacks of complaints… and the final nail in the deal was the fact that on the BBB.org they have a F rating… and are unaccredited.  While we had a really nice saleswoman…  when I see something like that I back away very quickly.  We excused ourselves and said we were going to go eat dinner.  Which is not entirely a lie, because we did in fact go eat dinner… but we also started driving towards Denver Mattress.  That is where our current mattress came from, and other than the fact that it is very old… we have loved it.  While there we found a Mattress we liked, as well as the storage bed above.  However after some deliberation decided not to do the storage bed… because it was pretty intense.  I am 6’4” and I had to lift myself a bit to get onto the bed… so that would make life hell on my slightly shorter wife.  So while we set out to get a dust ruffle… and finally did get that about 7 pm last night at Wal-Mart…  we also purchased a new mattress that is being delivered today.  As I started off this conversation…  yesterday went nothing like we had planned.

Lalafell Pirate Time

When I finally did manage to get home, I opted to pop into Final Fantasy XIV because today there is the big 2.5 patch going on… and the servers will be unplayable.  I figured I would run some Syrcus Tower in an attempt to get the rest of my set of bard gear.  Sure enough after a 30 minute long wait to get in… my queue popped and I had a pretty relaxed run with no real issues.  When it came down to the final boss Zande, there waiting for me was my hat.  My friend Thalen I am sure is jealous considering he has run this place on a daily basis trying to get it for months.  While I had not officially gotten every piece of gear, I at least had all of the cosmetic ones.  The above photo is in me with the full Amon outfit…  and I have to say it lasted maybe 10 minutes at most before I was glamouring the hideousness away.

After sifting through my bags and looking on the market board, I settled on a set that I liked for barding.  The Buccaneer’s Tricorne, Shirt and Boots are the basis for the outfit.  From there I mixed in Foestriker Mitts because they matched and looked awesome, and the Lalafell Gaskins “went” with the outfit given their greenish grey appearance.  I needed to shift to something after my recent holiday outfit, and I have to say I am pretty pleased with how it worked out.  I am the most adorable pirate ever.  After all the outfit shenanigans a guildie was complaining about the lack of luck she had with Garuda.  At which point I volunteered to tank it for her, and within a few minutes we had assembled a guild group.  Lesson learned for the night…  Normal Mode Garuda is NOTHING like the other modes.  It took us about four attempts to remember how the fight worked, but was a small price to pay to help out a friend.  While the day went nothing like expected, it ended in a really happy way surrounded by friends in Final Fantasy XIV.