Making Your Bed and Lying In It

Rob and I went to DC this past weekend and stayed at the Holiday Inn in Georgetown. It's an old hotel, with sleepy service (the front desk people would much rather talk to each other than to any of the customers on the paying side of the counter) and outdated furnishings ("Hello? The '80s called and they want their curtains back!"). The place was convenient to where we needed to be and we've stayed there before so it's not like we were surprised by the conditions.

When it came time to get into bed on Saturday night, I turned down the bedspread to find the weirdest combination of bedding I've ever seen on a hotel bed anywhere:

1. The bottom "fitted" sheet was not pulled fully onto the mattress so by the simple act of sitting on the side of the bed, the sheet came completely off.

2. The top sheet came up to the top of the bed and was folded over almost 24".

3. The blanket on top of this came up approximately 2/3 of the bed. When I was lying down, the blanket came to my waist.

4. There was another sheet ON TOP of the blanket. WTF?!!! It came up to my shoulder level.

At some point during the night, we both woke up freezing. I didn't have enough covers on me and couldn't pull the blanket up any further than my waist. Plus the bottom sheet has pulled free of the mattress at my feet. So I got up at 3AM, tore the bed apart and remade it to my satisfaction.

I started remaking the bed at Rob's place, even before I moved in. He used to jokingly tell everyone that "the military has been in to make the bed" and he wasn't too far off the truth!

I had the whole bedmaking thing down pat during Basic Training. Since we were always lined up alphabetically, two of my best buddies were Joanne McPhee (in line ahead of me) and Denise Noseworthy (in line behind me). Noseworthy was 1/4" short of 6 feet tall so we would get her to lie under the bed (pulling the bottom sheet tight through the spring platform) while Jo and I worked our magic on the top of the bed. The bottom sheet had 45 degree angled corners, the black stripe in the gray wool DND blanket ran down the centre of the bed and the top sheet was folded exactly 18" over the top edge of the blanket. The pillow also had to be pummelled into a certain dimension.

By the end of our 10 weeks together, the three of us could make three beds in 20 minutes. And we only ever slept in our beds the night before we were being issued clean linens (once a week). I slept on top in my sleeping bag the rest of the time.