Home And Family USA

What is the most peculiar piece of bedroom furniture you have come across? I mean, take a look around your bedroom. Most of the bedroom furniture there is just that – functional bedroom furniture. This furniture has a specific function to perform and excels at performing that. Take the bed itself for instance. It comes with a mattress and facilitates lying down. Which is what most people do with it anyways! Or take the bed stands for instance. They are meant to serve as convenient storage spaces for items related to the bedroom, which probably need to be tucked away from sight. In some cases, these bed stands come equipped with shelves of sorts so that people can store their books. So far these examples of bedroom furniture are fairly straightforward. In the rare case, I have come across bedroom furniture that reflects the style or personality of the owner. But in some of the houses I have had the opportunity to visit, I have come across some really strange bedroom furniture!

The strangest of these kinds of bedroom furniture was a centuries old alarm mechanism. I use the word mechanism on purpose. Because, unlike the digital clocks of today, this truly was a mechanical device that would wake the sleeper up with a veritable shudder. Based on the principle of the spring mechanism, it could be set for hours and half hours. Once the set time arrived, the device would release a spring on the underside of the bed, literally pushing the sleeper off it. In order that the sleeper not hurt himself, there was a barricade of sorts to prevent them from flying completely off the bed. This whole contraption fit snugly under the bed and lay there until disturbed.

In older houses, I have found bedroom furniture that includes the quaint mosquito net holder. Basically, this comprises four posts of the bed on which the mosquito net is hung or suspended from. But when the net is off, it does look like a pall of sorts. In fact, the first time I saw it, it gave me quite a fright. But the one bedroom furniture that totally freaked me out was the rotary meal deliverer. I really don’t know what else to call it. It was a mechanical contraption that delivered food to the person reclining comfortably on the bed!

When my husband and I moved from the mid-west to the east coast a few years ago, we discovered quickly that we had a problem. We had accumulated so much stuff during our five years in Nebraska that we couldn’t possibly fit it all in a U-haul to drag it halfway across the country, especially since there was the added complexity of also getting our two cars back east as well. We decided that one of us would drive a car and the other would drive the U-haul with the other car hitched to a tow hookup on the back. And to keep in touch with each other on the trip we bought a set of Motorola walkie talkies to use on the road between our vehicles.

At first the walkie talkies were a safety measure. If something happened to one of us and we needed to pull over, our walkie talkies would be a way to alert the other person to what was going on. The reality of how we used our Motorola walkie talkies on the trip was much less pragmatic than simple safety. We used them to entertain ourselves, amuse each other and have conversations while driving through ridiculously huge states with no good radio stations. Hello, Iowa, I’m talking to you!.

After a few hours, I began to see the Motorola walkie talkies as a way to give my husband status updates. I told him how the U-Haul looked from behind, I told him about the temperature in the interior of my car, I alerted him to a good song playing on the radio station I was listening to. We also each had a cat in our vehicles with us, so sometimes we would hold the walkie talkie up to the cat carrier to let it talk too. I guess what I’m trying to say is that driving across the United States, with only the cat in the carrier beside you as a companion, is a boring trip. Which is why we were so grateful for our Motorola walkie talkies.

We never used our walkie talkies again after completing the move. And I’d forgotten about them until recently when I found them in the basement while preparing for a yard sale. We thought about keeping them because they could come in handy for talking to each other in our four story house when we’re both on different floors. But we have an intercom system, so the Motorola walkie talkies really aren’t necessary. We decided to sell them at our yard sale for five dollars. And every person who looked at them had to listen to me rave about how great Motorola walkie talkies are for long trips, whether that’s what they wanted them for or not.