Day 20, Project 3 (but mostly a little rant about Project 8): Hairy Underpants

I have this thing about leaving dirty clothes lying around waiting to go in the laundry. I don’t know why. I don’t have anywhere near the same hangup about the clean clothes.

Obviously:


But for the most part, ever since I’ve had a washer/dryer of my own (and maybe, now that I think of it, because of all the years I didn’t have a washer/dryer of my own), the washing machine is my laundry hamper. Dirty clothes get tossed in there the minute they come off of a warm body (except for the occasional cold sock of Johnny‘s I find lying around). Dishtowels go in the second they touch anything other than water. Bath towels, after embarrassingly few (and a decidedly un-green number of) uses. And then it gets turned on when it’s full enough. Or almost. And only Johnny cares about separating out the colors from the whites (because he’s a painter, his whites are dear to him). This explains why of all my t-shirts are the same dingy gray, and why I don’t wear reds or blues too often.

So, even though there are only two of us, we do a load of laundry almost every day. Which in turn explains why I’m finding blue jeans in the closet that I didn’t know I had. I never get around to the back rotation when there’s always a clean pair spilling from the pile on the couch. (That couch -- or really love seat -- is, by the way, in the master bedroom. Which I point out in my own defense. It’s not like I leave the living room looking that way all the time. No. The living room is full of newspapers.)

But this week there aren’t two of us: Johnny’s still down the Cape. He’s on the home stretch and will be back for good tomorrow, but it’s going to rain tomorrow and I want to break in my new clothesline. Now! I’ve been waiting for two days and finally, finally, I have managed to dirty enough clothes to run the washer. Or at least enough to not feel guilty about it. Or almost.

Oh hell. There’s not much point having the clothesline if you’re going to run a half-full washer, is there? I mean, it’s not like I did this for Jolly Green points or anything -- I did it to save money -- but still, it just seems silly. The pisser is that of course tomorrow it will be full enough and I’ll have to run it (because I’ll simply have to) and then I’ll have to dry them in the dryer after all because it will be raining. Unless…

Yes! See, the cat has been sleeping on this one particular sheet in the clean-clothes pile for a while, but now that it’s finally warm at night she’s moved on to cooler climes (to give you some idea of how long this sheet’s been in that pile, let me just say: it’s flannel. Again though, in my own defense, this particular sheet has been left there just for her. Everything else in the pile has been worn and washed and rotated back in again a bunch of times since then.). Two months of cat-bed service counts as dirty even if it’s never touched a mattress, so in it goes. And one king-sized flannel sheet fills a washing machine very nicely.

It also throws a lot of cat hair. Which, I realize as I pick soggy clumps of it off my spun-flat underpants, doesn’t come off the laundry when you dry it on the line.

So I threw them in the dryer. And then I threw them on the couch. We’ll try this whole thing over whenever the sun comes out again.

In the meantime, I squirted the door with bleach and scraped it with some steel wool. I’ll tell you about that some other time. For now I’ve got a grill to see if I can put together. If I can, I think I just might have some tuna steaks from Trader Joe’s in the back of the freezer somewhere…

Day 20: Accomplished (even though I chose to write about the laundry, the work I did on the door still counts. And the grill will count too, if I finish it. Jinx jinx, spit spit…)
Time: 30 minutes (door again -- I’ll tell you all about it later, I swear, I’m just tired of bitching about the door for a little while, k?)
Cost: Nothing
Hairy Underpants: Perturbing