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My Life

NBC’s Olympics Still Needs Help

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They get major props for inviting Leslie Jones down to Rio, but NBC still has a ways to go.

I’ve been saying that for years.

For the last few years, I’ve been advocating for changing the whole “see it in prime time” shenanigans to a “prime time highlite reel” concept. Show us the biggest US wins, then the biggest overall upsets. Did a dark horse set a record? Show us that! Finally show us the “Olympics Funniest Home Videos” – the accidents, the gaffs, and the behind the scenes stuff like North and South Korea’s selfies. We don’t need to see every single race for the myriad preliminaries after all, unless someone outruns Usain Bolt.

Airing the Olympics from 7pm to midnight is terrible. Most of us have to work, so we can’t watch it that late anyway. Kids do summer school. If this is Prime Time, show us the best of the best. The greatest moments. The 41 year old gymnast and then 19 year old phenom. But spending fifteen minutes showing us the men get ready for the 4×100 Relay? We didn’t need that. You’ve got us on tape delay.

As for those extra channels, if we have them, let us watch them by having it easier to know what’s on where, but make it live.

Finally… I will buy whatever from whomever can air the fucking Opening and Closing Ceremonies without commercial interruption.

Casper Unboxing

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Moving from a Queen to a Queen + Cats is weird.

First of all, the size is noticeable when you have a Queen mattress. There’s an 8-inch gap on either side!

8 inch gap from the mattress to the frame

But the Casper arrived within 2 days. I ordered Sunday, called and tweaked the order, and it showed up Tuesday at 1pm.

The Bad

It’s heavy. 110lbs in the box, and we had to get it upstairs on our own. My wife did it alone. You all should bow and praise her.

The casper bed, rolled up

Look at that! It’s not 80″ or 76″ wide, though, it’s compressed.

That brings up the other bad thing. It’s not actually clear how to unroll it. It says to place it in position and grab that loose bit on top and unroll. No indication of up or down, and you know, you know that you don’t want to screw that up.

The Good

Just unroll it. Seriously. It’s set up so you cannot get it wrong. We hefted it onto the bed and unrolled. That gave us a shrink-wrapped bed in another plastic bag to protect it. We tore that open and in less than four minutes there was a new bed on our frame.

The Bed, unfurled

They joke on the website that you may want to video it to show the unboxing. You could vine that sucker. It’s fast.

The Interesting

It smelled of plastic, but not as bad as the pillows I’d grabbed at Ikea two days before. We put the fans on and let it alone while we ate dinner. By the time we were done, the bed smelled like … a bed.

If you’re interested in getting a Casper, use my affiliate link http://casper.com/friends/ipstenu (or the promo code ‘ipstenu’) and get $50 off.

Sleep Well

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It’s been a few weeks with the Casper mattress.

The bed is perfect for us. My wife and I love sleeping on futons, but we’ve had significant problems finding good ones. There have been problems with delivery or quality or a million other things. They just insist on making them out of crappy foam. And my thought was if we were going to spend all that much on foam, it should be good foam.

I have found the Casper to be made of good foam.

This is not the ‘drop a bowling ball’ kind of mattress, but it is very quiet. It doesn’t transfer much motion at all, so I sleep through her getting in and out of bed and vise versa. It also means when one of us tosses and turns, the other hardly cares.

And this is a problem!

I sleep so soundly in the bed, I don’t get to enjoy being lazy and lounge in bed. I fall asleep quickly, I sleep well, and I wake up refreshed.

It is positively horrible.

Casper The Friendly Bedpost

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We got a new bed. After arguing the mattress was ‘fine’ for the last year, and filpping it every time we changed the sheets, I announced “We’re buying a new bed for my birthday!” and that was that.

The Bed

We went big. Casper is a web-only mattress company. The mattresses are expensive-ish ($950 for a king queen + cats), but in reading the reviews on the website and off, I determined it’s a green product, vegan, and meant to do two very important things:

  • Not get overheated and sticky.
  • Not transfer motion.

My wife has a hard time getting comfy in bed. This was important. She also gets overheated.

Of course, buying a mattress without testing it is hard! You can lie on the mattress in a store, but until you sleep on it, you don’t know. When I saw the 100 night promise, I knew I could try it.

You have 100 nights to decide to keep any Casper product. If you decide the mattress isn’t right for you, reach out to us (support@casper.com) to arrange a pickup. We’ll send a courier over to remove the mattress from your home and donate it to a local charity or recycling center whenever possible. You’ll be refunded 100% — every penny.

100% free. And they pick it up.

The bed arrived on May 3rd, and I set up an alarm for 60 days. “Do you like your bed? Y/N? If No, email Casper!”

The Frame

I got an Ikea.

Look. We went to multiple stores and found hundreds of ugly, over designed, heavy beds. We wanted few things:

  • Light colored wood
  • Wood, not metal/fabric/leather
  • Off the ground by at least 5 inches (sorry futons)

Optional was storage space underneath. But it was really important that it felt light. The problem there is the super light ones were all super modern and my wife didn’t like that. A simple, pine bedframe would be nice, but those were hard to find in Queen+Cats sized, and I wanted a larger bed. Finally we settled on a solid wood (important) bed from Ikea that fit all our requirements. It was tall, it had room for storage, and it was light.

The Hurdal

It looks less short in reality. I lay on it in the store (a queen) and while I don’t understand why people put a bajillion pillows on that you just have to take off, it was quite nice.

The End Result?

I have 100 days to decide if I like the mattress, so I’ll check back in at 60. I will note that the bed is not marriage destroying, however read through the directions carefully before you start, and I strongly recommend you get three people for the build, not two. Also beer. Beer is good.

Who’s A Good Dog?

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We’ve all wondered about the philosophical merits of the question “Who’s a good dog?” And in order to help make sure dogs know, I tend to greet them with “Hello, Good Dog!” Most dogs, happy to be addressed, will make a happy face and their owner will laugh.

Dog thinking "What if I never find out who's a good boy?"

Last week, one of my neighbors (who normally grins and agrees with me when I greet him and his dog that way) replied, “Oh no, not today. Someone decided it would be fun to eat a shoe and poop all over the living room.”

And his dog looked down, embarrassed.