Clean Sheets Day!

I am really, really a Simple Pleasures kinda girl. I try not to sit around waiting for the one big thing that would make me happy if only I could go there, or buy this, or do this, or have that. I find lots of little things instead and stack them up.

Like, Mondays are Clean Sheets Day at my house. CarrieCleans comes on Mondays. She really doesn't do that much; I run a pretty tight ship (regardless of what my Mother may have told you). But she does the stuff I hate -- namely, vacuuming and mopping, and changing the beds. (I noticed Sunday night, for example, when I was doing laundry that there were stray batteries strewn around the floor. I have this dim memory that they got there when I threw a remote control against the wall, post-Ambien, when the TiVo and TV volume refused to synch. That's the sorta thing Carrie would notice, and clean up. And I wish she would've, because I suspect my weekend brunch guests might've thought I had batteries lying all over the place for some other reason entirely. Though they were polite not to comment. She also does other thoughtful things like put the pharmaceuticals in the dresser drawers and stuff that just doesn't occur to me.)

Anyway, all day on Monday at work, I'm looking forward to getting home, putting on my pink pajamas, and sliding into the clean sheets. You just can't believe how happy it makes me.

But I got bumped off the cleaning schedule this week for holiday traffic, so tonight, I was changing the beds myself (like an animal), when the sheets ripped. And I don't mean an insignificant tear, I mean they are shredded. The horrible sound they made was just like when Demi Moore and Rob Lowe are breaking up in About Last Night and she tears up the tea towel from her "hope chest" and throws it at him. Like that.

I never put the fitted sheets on right; they're always backward, or inside out, or upside down, and I guess that's how I tore them. And irritations like this are one of the few negatives about living alone -- because if anyone else lived here, that's the exact moment I would've screamed at them: "look what you made me do," followed closely by, "I guess I just can't have nice things."

I have more sheets, but these were my favorites. And there is no way to replace them, because they only get this soft (and ok, threadbare) after you've washed and dried them hundreds of times. Worse than that, they were about a jillion thread count, and I got them at some once-in-a-lifetime closeout sale -- because if there's anything I hate worse than shopping, it's paying retail.

I have heard of these "White Sales" that happen in February, so I guess this year I will line up with the rest of the cattle and go to one. Even if I didn't have backups, I would flat-out sleep on a bare mattress in a ditch before I would go to a mall this time of year and buy new ones.