Well, I sort of broke the self-imposed "ordering stuff fast" and bought two things I'd been thinking about and wanting (and one of which I had looked everywhere for and not found in a shop or in the usual catalogs I consult).
First of all: a rotary cutter template for a "tumbler" quilt. I have fat quarters of many of the Denyse Schmidt fabrics in my stash (purchased last fall) and I want to make them into a simple quilt - and I kept thinking how they'd look good as a tumbler quilt, but tracing and cutting 382 "tumblers" using a cardboard or thin plastic template and using scissors, meh. I want to get them all cut and put them in a big bag and draw them out at random and just SEW. I don't want to trace and cut five, and then sew a little, and then trace and cut more...and the thought of hand-cutting them all makes my wrists hurt just to think of it.
So I got to thinking: there are thick plastic templates for just about everything, shouldn't there be one for tumblers? It took some searching but I found one. (I just hope the source I ordered it from, above, is reliable - I've never heard of them before but their security info seemed to be in order...)
I also made a bigger purchase - one of those Sharper Image sound-generating machines (And I went all-out, I got the one with fifty sounds. It even has the sound of a hair dryer...except the real reason I got it is that it has both pink and white noise as choices, and I've read that pink noise is optimal for noise blocking when you're trying to sleep).
I did that because once again I noticed how soundly I slept at my parents' house, and how my sleep tends to be interrupted here. I've concluded it's that I get a lot of street noise - my bedroom is on the first floor, I am practically at a corner (and the street in front of my house, people sometimes drive kind of fast on. And lots of people around here have those big diesel pickups which are just loud). I had been using an air filter that makes a whooshing noise but they stopped making the replacement filters for it and I figured it's best not to keep reusing the old filter because it's probably spewing dust out into my room.
I am a light sleeper and any kind of "unexpected" noise can wake me up.
And I figured it was best to get it NOW, before whistle tips become a fad in my town. (Have you heard of these things? Basically they weld a little thing into the tailpipe and the car makes this humming whistle that sounds not unlike a distant siren. While I am all for people being able to "customize" and stuff, it just sort of enrages me to think of people driving through residential areas with these things and disturbing the existence of people who'd rather not listen to them. Especially at night. I'm already angry at the people who jack up their car sound systems so much that all you hear are the body panels rattling as they go down the street [you don't HEAR the bass so much as FEEL it...sometimes I almost feel when I'm close to one of those boom cars that it's trying to reset my heartbeat to a different rhythm, and it makes me feel kind of chokey and panicked, like I'm going to go into an arrhythmia. Even the guys around here who do it with country music have that effect on me.]).
So anyway. If spending a little money now means I get to listen to a babbling brook or synthesized wind in trees when I'm trying to sleep - and hopefully blocks out some of the street noise - it will be worth it.
1 comment:
For years I've used recorded thunderstorms and ocean waves as my "masking" sounds for sleep. We don't get thunderstorms often here on the coast, and I love the gentle rumble of thunder!
I've done this so long that I started with cassette tapes (which had to be manually reversed) and have moved to CDs. Well worth the expense, in my book.
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