The Great Sleep Out

Yesterday afternoon while Carol and I were sitting out on the patio sipping a glass of wine, (hers white, mine red,) I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea.

“Lets sleep out here tonight!” I said, “We can move the table and chairs out of the way, blow up the queen size air mattress and use the sleeping bags we bought for camping. It should be fun!”

Carol wasn't as excited about the idea as I was, but she reluctantly went along with it.

We tried to remember where we had stashed the camping gear and finally found the sleeping bags in the shop and the air mattress rolled up under my bed. I got the shop vac to inflate the mattress while Carol unrolled the sleeping bags. “Just lay one on top of the other,” I said, “we should be snug and cozy between them. It's too much of a hassle to zip them together.” The dogs were already showing interest in what to them, looked like a big comfy doggy bed.

As usual I retired first, and hardly got between the sleeping bags before Taz and Squeak hopped aboard, bouncing me up and down as they worked their way into a comfortable spot. I soon found the drawback to not zipping the sleeping bags together, when a cold draft of air hit my leg. I adjusted the bag to seal it off, which caused another cold spot on my arm, and on and on it went. I finally drifted off and slept until Carol came to bed, which caused some major bouncing up and down and a lot of laughing while we and the dogs tried to bounce our way into comfortable positions.

Naturally, all of my sealed off cold air drafts opened up again and I struggled to get them sealed back up. Carol was having trouble with the dogs claiming her side of the bed, (After all they were there first!) and by then the air mattress was starting to lose some of its bounciness because it was also loosing some of its air. Carol finally gave up around ten o’clock, surrendered to Taz and Squeak and moved back inside to the comfort of her bedroom.

When I started to feel the hardness of the patio bricks against my hip, as the leaking mattress deflated, I packed it in and traipsed into the house, the two dogs right behind me. Squeak jumped up on the bed and snuggled up against my back, Taz curled up in his doggy bed under the bedside table, and a collective sigh could be heard throughout the household as our world returned to normal.