And on the seventh day, they washed
Sunday is laundry day at my house. It's not that I've set this day aside for that explicit purpose, so much as I just put the job off for as long as possible before we all must once again dress for work & school.
Lately, laundry has become increasingly more difficult though. First, there's the complete chore, in & of itself, of just collecting it all. Today, I picked up dirty clothes off the floors of two bedrooms, two bathrooms, the upstairs hallway, the stairwell, the living room, the entrance hall, the kitchen & the garage. Then there's the impossible task of washing the clothes faster than My Kid can go swimming in them, replacing them with clean, dry clothes from his drawers.
But this is not the topic of today's post. No, the laundry challenge I face today is the simple act of maneuvering in and out of the laundry room.
Even with just the one child, we seem to amass an inordinate amount of crap. And since the laundry room is located right in the center of our daily universe, the kitchen-living area, it becomes the storage area for shoes, sweatshirts, gym bags, and any & everything else that doesn't belong in the kitchen-living area but somehow seems to end up there.
(And while we're on the subject, why oh why don't homebuilders put the laundry room UPstairs...where all the laundry is???)
Maybe I take this a little personally, but since I'm the only one in the family who happened to have been born with ovaries, I am, afterall, the only person in the household that actually USES the laundry room. Mops, brooms, buckets - maybe even dogfood - I can accept. But when I can no longer open the door for all the shit that's been shoved into that tiny space meant for washing, I start to become annoyed.
Now today - I new challenge. I mentioned to Big Daddy last week that the dryer doesn't seem to be working properly. I set it on the highest heat for the longest allowable time on the dial (80 minutes) and still a load of towels is only half dry. Crunch those numbers, willya? Three hours to dry a load of towels X all the loads I gotta do = all fucking day to do laundry.
So Big Daddy calls Sears service line and the woman tells him to turn on the dryer and check the outside vent to see if it's clogged. No, no problem there. Blowing like crazy. So - rather than arranging for a serviceman to come out - she tells him, "The next time you dry a load of clothes, disconnect the hose on the back that connects it to the outside vent." WTF??? Rather than question this obviously INSANE advice, Big Daddy pulls my dryer out away from the wall...so now, if I hold my upper body at just the right angle, I can just manage to squeeze myself in and out of the laundry room. Forget the basket - there's no way it's coming in with me.
So he unhooks the hose, but I protest too much on the grounds that large electrical appliances are vented to the outdoors for a reason, and even the prospect of a huge legal settlement from Sears isn't enough to make me risk all of our lives to carbon monoxide poisoning. So he hooks it back up.
And he tells me, "But don't move the dryer."
Uhh, yeah. Five-foot-three and 120 pounds and he thinks I can MOVE THE DRYER??? Ha. Not even it clean underwear depends on it.
