Attitudes change along with the seasons

I just finished the last of my three-day tennis camp sessions at Whitman College for 2024. Determined to improve my game, I stubbornly remained on the court through a barrage of hits and misses, peppered with lots of laughs, frustration, and exhaustion. At least I had no injuries until the last day of the previous camp. With no one to blame but myself, I missed a shot and whacked my lip with the racquet. I had no lost teeth, but I woke up with a black and blue lip.

I started the first camp with a miserable backache due to the new mattress we recently purchased for our downstairs bedroom. Daniel and I moved our bedroom from the second floor to the first a few weeks before the camp. Going up and down our extraordinarily steep stairs in the middle of the night to use the bathroom was getting tiresome. However, that meant replacing our queen bed with a king with the controls to move the head and foot up and down.

The bed frame has a lot more options than the upstairs version, some modern and some not so much. The massage feature feels like it needs a place to put quarters like old Motel 6 “Magic Fingers.” On the modern side, the frame has motion sensors under the bed that light up in various colors when your feet hit the floor.

However, I was a little too aggressive when I went for the extra firm mattress. The first night, I felt like I was sleeping on a cement slab, which provided no relief for my aching muscles after five hours at tennis camp. My back ached.

The mattress store has a 120-day “guarantee” that lets you exchange a mattress that’s not to your liking. I took advantage of the offer the next day, and the mattress will be exchanged next week for another extra-firm but with a soft plush top. Hopefully, that will relieve my back pain and my grumpiness.

Exacerbating my pain from the rock-hard mattress and the three intense tennis camp weekends was the work involved in breaking down the garden for winter. It is back-breaking work to pull out gigantic sunflowers, tomatoes, squash, dead cabbage, and other plants, along with endless raking and bagging of leaves.

And just to add to my grumpiness, Mugsy is waking me up an hour earlier because he’s still on Daylight Savings time. Grumpy may not be the right word to describe my attitude, but I don’t think the right one is appropriate for this column.

However, on the bright side, we have enough tomato sauce to last through at least ten years, a mouse-proof container of spaghetti and acorn squash in the cellar, ratatouille in the freezer, and pureed cauliflower and broccoli that we grew this year.

I will also admit to my winter weakness of stocking the pantry with Lipton’s Cup of Soup. It’s probably an envelope full of chemicals and fake chicken, but it’s perfect for a fast salt fix on a cold day.

As the season and weather change, the days become shorter. Daniel is working later to deliver holiday catalogs, gifts, cards, and ballots, so I am on dinner duty. The roads are wetter, and soon, they will be icy and snowy. I’m not sure a new mattress will be the panacea for my attitude.