If this means I'm old, I'll take it.

This may be a sign of getting old, but is there any one purchase in life that gives as much long-term daily comfort as a new mattress?

Rich and I have had our current mattress for 8 years, and it has served us well. It was one of our first post-college "adult" purchases, and it was such a joy not to be sleeping on Richard's old full-sized bed from high school that had a huge dip in the center (and no, that dip was not me). But it's day is done, and it's time for a new mattress.

So, as this was Presidents Weekend, and every single mattress store in the country was having a huge sale, we decided to brave shopping. Richard had decided to seriously haggle on this purchase, as mattresses have a huge mark-up, and many salespeople have latitude to negotiate.

We headed up to Glendale, near the Galleria, where there are several mattress stores on one corner (the theory being that we could go from one to the other to get the best price). We walked into the first store and the sales guy let us know that most mattresses were on sale "25%-35% off the marked price," not counting clearance models. We found a couple we liked, and then noticed that there were some 2006 models that were on clearance. Knowing that the salespeople would be very eager to get rid of these 2006 models, we decided to make our play, offering to pay 30% less than the clearance. Rich was great, and the sales guy came back with a price that we could live with, which ended up being about $200 less than the clearance price! Here is the mattress we ended up purchasing, it's so soft!

The bummer is that the mattress had to be ordered (no floor sample for us!), so we won't have it delivered until Saturday. I'm counting the days. Does this make me old?