The Poosey Digest: For goodness sakes, stay the night!

Greetings from the Ridge.

It’s always been my dream and once I learn the tricks of the trade I hope to become Poosey’s next entrepreneur. As Herb and I travel we’ve become increasingly attracted to the bed and breakfast establishments. They’re unique, they often have a homey atmosphere and the price is affordable. Now all I’ve got to do is learn the clever little twists and turns of running a hotel. Lord knows I’ve stayed in enough of them and I just wish I’d paid more attention to how they do things.

There are certain features standard to most roadside inns and dog gone it, I think that between Herb and me we can work these into our own Crump’s Bed and Breakfast.

For example: How do they fix the TV remote controls so they work perfectly well when you stand in front of the set, but once you lay down on the bed they become inoperative? I swear it’s a distance of but a few feet, but once your tail hits the mattress the thing goes deader than Herb’s libido. Maybe both need batteries.

And then there’s the matter of the hotel shower. I’m telling you it’s pure magic. You first find the formula for operating this particular hotel’s spigot then you stand there bent over in your altogether until you get the water temperature something close to what you’re used to. This is when the magic happens. When you step into the tub and turn the setting to "shower head," the water temperature doesn’t even resemble the Fahrenheit of just a moment ago. "Scald" and "arctic" seem to be the two choices. I’ve got Herb working on our own plumbing so we can become a real hotel.

In-room coffee is standard equipment in even the shoddiest of hostelries and so I’ve gone out and purchased a small coffee maker. Trouble is, it pours correctly without leaking backwards like a Hampshire sow. I know it’s defective because the typical hotel room coffee pot must shoot rearward onto your shaving kit. Herb’s working on his coffee shooter.

Then there’s the matter of card keys. Our house doesn’t even have lock-able bedrooms, much less the more techno-correct card keys. Okay, we can install them, but I still can’t figure out how to make a card key that won’t work after you’ve hauled your suitcase up to your room. In every hotel I’ve seen you must always drag your bag back down to the front desk to get a second version. We’re working on it.

And what do I do about "The Spot?" You’ve seen it. It’s in every hotel room, usually near the bed, and colored a mysterious brown or gray… sort of the shape of Iowa. Like the Mickey Mouse logo on all things Disney, this spot seems to be the mark of a genuine American hotel. I think they put it there to add an air of mystery to your vacation experience. You look at it and wonder how it got there and what it is. Although you’re tempted to reach down and touch it, you don’t. You step over. We’ve got to get ourselves a spot of our own.

The only real wrench in the works is our heating and cooling. The whole house works off a single thermostat and I know that a real hotel room has its own controls devised by a demented wizard somewhere in Afpakistan. The dial must be worn just short of readability, the entire cooling system must operate in exactly the opposite way of the guest’s own home, no matter how many temperature settings are listed the fan can only operate on "off" or "Katie-bar-the-door." Like white water rafting and the spot on the carpet, the hotel room’s ventilation system must be a part of the Adventure World experience. We’ll figure something out.

I’m going shopping this week and I’m determined to trick out our humble abode with all things hotel-ish: bath towels with a slight texture of sand paper, bathroom tissue that’s second cousin to newsprint, hair driers that fall off the wall when you look at them, mirrored closet doors that jam in mid-slide, cords for window drapes that require a PhD in physics, mysterious little blots of fuzz to stick into the corners of the dresser drawers, a bedside alarm clock that blinks a continual "12:00! 12:00! 12:00!," a bedside phone with 15 button options… all of which connect you to the same lady at the front desk, an emergency exit map on the back of the door than be understood only by trained Tibetan Sherpas, and of course I need to print up a few little notes that say, "Hi, my name is Freida and I cleaned your room. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to make your stay more enjoyable."

You ever in Poosey, stop by. And for goodness sakes, stay the night!