February 14, 2007~~4:57 p.m.
Slip slidin' away...

Forever, I have wanted satin sheets. In my mind, they were luxurious and romantic and conjured images of ... I don't know ... two people way hotter than us having the sort of ravenous, all night, passionate love-making that I can't imagine having time to fit into my very-busy-been-married-seventeen-years-too-much-tv-watchin'-need-a-MINIMUM-of-eight-hours-of-sleep-have-to-get-up-and-go-to-work-in-the-morning life. But, hey, fantasies work that way.

So anyway, satin sheets, as it turns out, are very expensive. That was reason number one why we didn't already have them. The other reason was that the most readily available ones seemed to come only in whorehouse red. Given that it seems entirely slutty enough, in a room that my teenage children have to think about their parents sleeping in, to have satin sheets at all, the leave-your-money-on-the-dresser ones were just out of the question.

Fast forward to sometime right around Christmas. (Oh, you didn't realize we were in the past did you? Keep up, people..) Wandering through Mervyns, my eye was caught by... satin sheets. On sale. And, most importantly, not red. I got what I considered to be a great deal for Cal King sheets in almost the exact golden yellow of the paint in our bedroom, that also just happened to be satin. Dream. Come. True.

Until this weekend, they sat in their package between my night stand and the bed. Waiting.

I suggested, since it was time to strip the bed anyway, that we put the new sheets on a few days early for Valentine's Day. So on Saturday afternoon, the husband wrestled them onto the bed.

The fantasy *me* could hardly wait for bedtime. And, let me tell you, those sheets did not disappoint. They were smooth and luxurious and slippery against my skin. It was, in a word, hot.

But, given that we are old, married people, we put the fire out at a reasonable hour and settled in to go to sleep. *That*, my friends, is when the real fun started.

Because, you see, it is exactly the thing, that lack of friction, that makes satin sheets so deliciously fun for playing in bed, that makes them so incredibly ill-suited for sleeping. My satin-encased pillow slipped between my head and the satin-wrapped mattress like a shoe on a banana peel. The weight of the blankets, unevenly balanced in any direction, started the sheets sliding in one of those things-in-motion-stay-in-motion laws of physics sort of ways. All night long we were waking up to pull the covers back up onto the bed so we wouldn't freeze or to retrieve pillows from the floor. It would have made a great movie... well, probably more of a scene in a movie as there wasn't much plot development.

I suppose we could have taken them off after the first night, but they were supposed to be for Valentine's Day. So on night two, I bundled up for bed so that when the blankets slid, I could live without them. The husband whined a little (the man is very ritualistic about sleeping and the way the blankets must pull up just so). And so we've continued to live with the banana pillows and the Isaac Newton sliding covers so that I could have satin sheets on my bed for Valentine's Day.

So if I look a little tired this week, I can just wink and say, "We got satin sheets."

~Alice