A New Englander Moves to New Orleans, Chapter Fourteen: My Brush with Being a Pioneer Woman
I was homesick this weekend.
On first glance, I shouldn't have been. I had a completely self-indulgent weekend and did a bunch of stuff I would never have done at home. Namely, I watched the second series of "Sherlock" twice more* and wrote 25,000 words of fic.** I had ice cream for dinner on Saturday and did absolutely nothing of any utility. It should all have been quite lovely and indeed it was.
Except that it snowed in New England this weekend. Their first snowfall of the season, and though my mother was sad because she was hoping for a snow-less winter, I was extremely jealous. My family settled inside all day on Saturday, cuddled under blankets while snow fell. They had homemade soup and cups of hot cocoa and the world was hushed and beautiful and I was jealous beyond belief. I mean, *I* spent all day Saturday doing nothing, too, but it isn't the same, for me, to spend all day doing nothing when it's nice outside. When it's a nice day outside, I consider a day doing nothing to be, well, laziness. When it's snowing outside, what's anyone going to say to you? You can gesture to the window and be like, "Look at it outside! I'm not going out in that! I'm just going to stay in here and watch this episode of 'Sherlock' for the twentieth time this week." And people are like, "Yes, that makes sense, good for you, here, have a nice cuppa while you do that." When you do that when it's nice outside, people are like, "You have a problem, walk away from the television." Yes, yes, then the snow grows to be ugly and dirty and an enormous mess but I love the day of a snowstorm, love-love-love, and I cannot shake this feeling I have that all this warm weather all year 'round is simply unnatural.
I am such a New Englander.
So, anyway, I was all homesick over not getting to have snow, which then meant that I was even more self-indulgent with fannish pursuits ("You deserve to watch this fanvid again, you didn't get snow this weekend!") and it was all just a vicious circle.
And then. Sunday struck. In an effort to be somewhat productive, I decided to do laundry, and this is why one should never make an effort to be somewhat productive.***
My washing machine broke. Not badly, by which I mean: It's not like water went rushing all over the house. And oh, God, now that I have typed that, please don't let water be rushing all over the house next time I do something. But it stopped draining and started blinking an error message at me. I Googled this error message, and thankfully websites were no longer protesting SOPA so it was possible for me to conclude that my hose is clogged or kinked up or something. There is no way I was going to be able to fix this problem myself. So I e-mailed my landlord and commenced Operation Get Clothes to Dry.
Guys. Getting clothes to dry when your washing machine has not been properly drained is way harder than it should be! THIS IS WHAT PIONEER WOMEN HAD TO DO ALL THE TIME, AND HENCE WHY I WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A PIONEER WOMAN AND WISH TO DIE RATHER THAN SURVIVE A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE WHERE I WOULD HAVE TO DO THIS ALL THE TIME:
First of all, you have to wring all the excess water out of the clothes. If you are me, this is difficult to do well and you end up just getting yourself soaking wet in the process because you are the clumsiest person ever and clearly meant to have an entire household staff like the Countess of Grantham.
The next thing you figure out is that, even if you have wrung all the excess water out of the clothes that you are capable of wringing out of them, the dryer will not be able to dry them, not even if you put the dryer on for 140 minutes, because apparently dryers are big babies and the clothes already have to be almost dry for a dryer to have any effect.
After figuring that out, the next step is to decide to drape clothes all over your bathtub in an effort to get them to dry. You do this by filling up your laundry basket with the clothes.
This is when you learn that wet clothes are WAY heavier than dry clothes, even wet clothes you have wrung out and put in a dryer for 140 minutes. So then you have to make multiple trips to the bathroom with a few items of clothes each time.
This is the point when you learn that your blue pajama shirt has now dyed all of your white bras, socks, and underwear blue, which it has never done before and can only be attributed to the fact that the water didn't drain correctly and the white stuff was left sitting in dye. So that's lovely.
The following morning you learn that apparently clothes do not dry if spread out over a bathtub, given the fact that they are still sopping wet.
After tipping your head at them in intense thought for a little while, you decide to spread them out on your balcony. This eliminates the cleanliness of the clothes (dubious, anyway, since the water never drained), but might stop mold from growing in them, you assume.
The balcony trick works. When you get home from work, you are able to put your clothes in the dryer and they actually dry. Of course, they are also filthy and all dyed blue, but they will no longer be growing mold. You hope.
In the meantime, your landlord stops by, and you try to ignore the fact that you have blue-dyed undergarments spread out everywhere for him to see and show him all the standing water in the washing machine. He says a man will come by to fix it while you are at work. Excellent, you think.
You go to work. You get an admirable amount of work done and do not once open an e-mail to yourself to write lines of fic out. Progress may be being made. It's a lovely day, and, if you don't think about the fact that it's January and it should be cold and snowy and adorable-coat-and-scarf-y, then it's really rather nice.
You unlock the door to your apartment...and can't get in. Because the deadbolt is locked. You have never had the key to the deadbolt. Apparently, the repair person did.
You call your landlord and explain the situation. He tells you the same key that opens the bottom lock should open the deadbolt. You try this. You cannot get the key into the deadbolt. You feel like you are losing your mind. You tell him it is not the same key, you've even turned it upside-down, it will not go in. He says he'll be there shortly.
You sit on the floor by your door and read "Gone with the Wind." When the landlord arrives, he says it's a good thing you have a book. You say, truthfully, that you always have a book, because you take the streetcar, and you never know when you might wait 40 minutes for the streetcar. He doesn't seem to think this is a funny commentary. Instead, he takes your key and tries to fit it into the deadbolt. "See?" you say. "It doesn't work." He frowns and then jams the key in using all his weight. It goes in, and then, after a lot of coaxing, the deadbolt eventually opens. And even though you know there's no way that's how a key system is supposed to operate, you still feel like an idiot, because you just do when things like this happen, and suddenly you are homesick again.
Oh, and the washing machine needs a part and who knows how long that's going to take.
So what you do is you put "Sherlock" back on.****
End scene.
*It gets better each time, if you're wondering. Also, I highly recommend mixing the order up. Going straight from "Scandal" to "Fall" extra-highlights how cold the Mycroft scenes in "Fall" are, and watching "Hounds" first lets it come into its own and escape "Scandal"'s shadow. If you're me.
**I love how I went from eighteen months of "I could never write 'Sherlock' fic" to "Never mind, I am writing novels' worth of 'Sherlock' fic" in the span of, basically, ninety minutes.
***There has been a lot of writing of Mycroft dialogue over the past week or so. I am becoming very fond of the use of the word "one" for the impersonal "you."
****In fact, Mycroft would have done this whole thing using "one," not "you." Were he here, he'd frown at me.
On first glance, I shouldn't have been. I had a completely self-indulgent weekend and did a bunch of stuff I would never have done at home. Namely, I watched the second series of "Sherlock" twice more* and wrote 25,000 words of fic.** I had ice cream for dinner on Saturday and did absolutely nothing of any utility. It should all have been quite lovely and indeed it was.
Except that it snowed in New England this weekend. Their first snowfall of the season, and though my mother was sad because she was hoping for a snow-less winter, I was extremely jealous. My family settled inside all day on Saturday, cuddled under blankets while snow fell. They had homemade soup and cups of hot cocoa and the world was hushed and beautiful and I was jealous beyond belief. I mean, *I* spent all day Saturday doing nothing, too, but it isn't the same, for me, to spend all day doing nothing when it's nice outside. When it's a nice day outside, I consider a day doing nothing to be, well, laziness. When it's snowing outside, what's anyone going to say to you? You can gesture to the window and be like, "Look at it outside! I'm not going out in that! I'm just going to stay in here and watch this episode of 'Sherlock' for the twentieth time this week." And people are like, "Yes, that makes sense, good for you, here, have a nice cuppa while you do that." When you do that when it's nice outside, people are like, "You have a problem, walk away from the television." Yes, yes, then the snow grows to be ugly and dirty and an enormous mess but I love the day of a snowstorm, love-love-love, and I cannot shake this feeling I have that all this warm weather all year 'round is simply unnatural.
I am such a New Englander.
So, anyway, I was all homesick over not getting to have snow, which then meant that I was even more self-indulgent with fannish pursuits ("You deserve to watch this fanvid again, you didn't get snow this weekend!") and it was all just a vicious circle.
And then. Sunday struck. In an effort to be somewhat productive, I decided to do laundry, and this is why one should never make an effort to be somewhat productive.***
My washing machine broke. Not badly, by which I mean: It's not like water went rushing all over the house. And oh, God, now that I have typed that, please don't let water be rushing all over the house next time I do something. But it stopped draining and started blinking an error message at me. I Googled this error message, and thankfully websites were no longer protesting SOPA so it was possible for me to conclude that my hose is clogged or kinked up or something. There is no way I was going to be able to fix this problem myself. So I e-mailed my landlord and commenced Operation Get Clothes to Dry.
Guys. Getting clothes to dry when your washing machine has not been properly drained is way harder than it should be! THIS IS WHAT PIONEER WOMEN HAD TO DO ALL THE TIME, AND HENCE WHY I WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A PIONEER WOMAN AND WISH TO DIE RATHER THAN SURVIVE A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE WHERE I WOULD HAVE TO DO THIS ALL THE TIME:
First of all, you have to wring all the excess water out of the clothes. If you are me, this is difficult to do well and you end up just getting yourself soaking wet in the process because you are the clumsiest person ever and clearly meant to have an entire household staff like the Countess of Grantham.
The next thing you figure out is that, even if you have wrung all the excess water out of the clothes that you are capable of wringing out of them, the dryer will not be able to dry them, not even if you put the dryer on for 140 minutes, because apparently dryers are big babies and the clothes already have to be almost dry for a dryer to have any effect.
After figuring that out, the next step is to decide to drape clothes all over your bathtub in an effort to get them to dry. You do this by filling up your laundry basket with the clothes.
This is when you learn that wet clothes are WAY heavier than dry clothes, even wet clothes you have wrung out and put in a dryer for 140 minutes. So then you have to make multiple trips to the bathroom with a few items of clothes each time.
This is the point when you learn that your blue pajama shirt has now dyed all of your white bras, socks, and underwear blue, which it has never done before and can only be attributed to the fact that the water didn't drain correctly and the white stuff was left sitting in dye. So that's lovely.
The following morning you learn that apparently clothes do not dry if spread out over a bathtub, given the fact that they are still sopping wet.
After tipping your head at them in intense thought for a little while, you decide to spread them out on your balcony. This eliminates the cleanliness of the clothes (dubious, anyway, since the water never drained), but might stop mold from growing in them, you assume.
The balcony trick works. When you get home from work, you are able to put your clothes in the dryer and they actually dry. Of course, they are also filthy and all dyed blue, but they will no longer be growing mold. You hope.
In the meantime, your landlord stops by, and you try to ignore the fact that you have blue-dyed undergarments spread out everywhere for him to see and show him all the standing water in the washing machine. He says a man will come by to fix it while you are at work. Excellent, you think.
You go to work. You get an admirable amount of work done and do not once open an e-mail to yourself to write lines of fic out. Progress may be being made. It's a lovely day, and, if you don't think about the fact that it's January and it should be cold and snowy and adorable-coat-and-scarf-y, then it's really rather nice.
You unlock the door to your apartment...and can't get in. Because the deadbolt is locked. You have never had the key to the deadbolt. Apparently, the repair person did.
You call your landlord and explain the situation. He tells you the same key that opens the bottom lock should open the deadbolt. You try this. You cannot get the key into the deadbolt. You feel like you are losing your mind. You tell him it is not the same key, you've even turned it upside-down, it will not go in. He says he'll be there shortly.
You sit on the floor by your door and read "Gone with the Wind." When the landlord arrives, he says it's a good thing you have a book. You say, truthfully, that you always have a book, because you take the streetcar, and you never know when you might wait 40 minutes for the streetcar. He doesn't seem to think this is a funny commentary. Instead, he takes your key and tries to fit it into the deadbolt. "See?" you say. "It doesn't work." He frowns and then jams the key in using all his weight. It goes in, and then, after a lot of coaxing, the deadbolt eventually opens. And even though you know there's no way that's how a key system is supposed to operate, you still feel like an idiot, because you just do when things like this happen, and suddenly you are homesick again.
Oh, and the washing machine needs a part and who knows how long that's going to take.
So what you do is you put "Sherlock" back on.****
End scene.
*It gets better each time, if you're wondering. Also, I highly recommend mixing the order up. Going straight from "Scandal" to "Fall" extra-highlights how cold the Mycroft scenes in "Fall" are, and watching "Hounds" first lets it come into its own and escape "Scandal"'s shadow. If you're me.
**I love how I went from eighteen months of "I could never write 'Sherlock' fic" to "Never mind, I am writing novels' worth of 'Sherlock' fic" in the span of, basically, ninety minutes.
***There has been a lot of writing of Mycroft dialogue over the past week or so. I am becoming very fond of the use of the word "one" for the impersonal "you."
****In fact, Mycroft would have done this whole thing using "one," not "you." Were he here, he'd frown at me.