Soft or Firm?

Q. How do you get down from an elephant?

A. You don’t get down from an elephant, you get down from a duck.

When I was a much younger child, that riddle confused me.  I think it might have been because we had foam pillows and not feather pillows.  I think that was before down jackets, too.

That’s my introduction to the serious conversation about foam pillows versus feather pillows.  I’m a foam pillow person, what are you?  Feather pillows don’t seem substantial enough to me and the few times I’ve used one I felt like I had feathers to the left, feathers to the right and nothing underneath my head.  If I use a foam pillow, and it starts out firm enough, I don’t feel like I’m sleeping with my head in a trough.

I do find that most foam pillows are only good for about two years and then the foam in the pillows either starts clumping up or disappearing.  My last pillow was suffering from "where’d the foam go."  A new pillow makes a great christmas present for me.  They can be inexpensive and cerainly don’t weight too much.  They are a bit difficult to wrap.

I asked for a new pillow this year (see, "where’d the foam go" above) and Mrs. Ender got me a memory foam pillow.  I was a bit hesitant at first, it seems far too thin and far to firm to be comfortable, but after only three nights of use I’m a believer.

It is thinner than a regular pillow, but it’s just the right height to support my head without bending my neck either up or down.  And it is very firm but it also has a lot of give, so my head sinks into the pillow but not enough to cause my neck to bend very much.

I like my memory foam pillow.

Speaking of Mrs. Ender, she’s out visting her mom through this weekend.  She managed to get a relatively low airfare because she was willing to leave at god-awful-early a.m.  Rather than wake both of us up at even-god-awful-earlier a.m. to get ready and drive to the airport, she stayed the night at the local Marriott.  With the holiday associate rate it only cost $29 for the night.  I drove her to the hotel on Wednesday night, we had dinner at one of the hotel’s restaurants, had some wonderful hotel sex and then I left and she got up at not-quite-as-god-awful a.m. and took the hotel shuttle to the airport. Win, win and win.

On my home PC I keep getting notices that my Nero has some updates to install.  When I try to complete the install I get a message that it couldn’t connect to the Nero servers and it errors out.  The suggestions on Nero’s forums is to disable my firewall and/or antivirus and try again.  I disabled both, got the same error and then got the FBI/Moneypak virus!  From the Nero update.  Stupid update.  It took most of last night for AntiMalware to do a complete search and I’m still not comfortable it found everything.  When I get home this evening I am going to do a system restore from the last restore point. Stupid Nero update.

I have to take some pictures of the wire jewelry I’m making from chain maile rings.  This stuff looks really cool and Mrs. Ender has already put dibs on a bracelet length chain I’ve made.  I also managed to find the weave pattern for the chain bracelet that first got me interested in chain maile jewelry and I have to tinker with the wire guage and ring size to get just the right effect, but the small sample I made gives me the same "oh, neat" feeling I got when I first saw this weave.

I have to make some soap this weekend.  A big batch of real Castile soap (100% olive oil) and some multi layer heart soap for Valentine’s day.  A red heart made from my regular soap surrounded by a  red melt-and-pour soap heart imbedded in a bar of my regular white soap.  I just need to figure out scent for this soap.  What does Valentine’s day smell like?

Other than that, I’ve got nothing to tell.

Ender is out.