So Michael and I decided the playroom rug had seen better days. We went to Gracely’s and after spending much of the afternoon looking at rug samples, we agreed on one, an elegant but friendly green beauty. “This is going to be so nice,” I told Michael. Then I whispered in his ear, “I can’t wait to have sex on it.”

We had to wait two weeks for delivery and installation, but that gave us plenty of time to clean out the room and paint the walls. No need to remove the old rug, the installation guys would take care of that. “It can be kind of a mess—the removal,” we were told, so we opted to spend that afternoon at the Blue Coyote Café enjoying muffins and tea, reading our books, and thinking about how wonderful our new rug would be.