clean favorite socks!
I cannot tell you when was the last time I did laundry. I cannot tell you because even if I could trace it back I would be too embarrassed to say but mostly because I cannot trace it back to any particular month or season. I have a hunch about what year it was.
Old friends and circle members know that I own an obscene number of socks and a semi-obscene number of pairs of underwear. When we lived in the warehouse in downtown Seattle in the early 90s I developed the habit of buying new socks and underwear when I ran out because it was such on unwieldy process to do laundry there. There were no laundromats nearby so lisagail and I would have to pack up all the dirty clothes and linens and towels and blankets and put them in the van--which was purchased mainly to haul musical equipment but worked well for lots of other things--and drive to some laundromat hoping that there would be both parking and unoccupied washers and dryers. Somehow it was much worse than walking to the laundromat is now even though I did not have to carry 50 pounds of laundry on my back down the sidewalk in the middle of the night because it back and pwas in the van and we did laundry during the day like more normal folk.
Not that we were normal folk. We were both diurnal back then though.
But so I have a large collection of socks and underwear some of which came with me from Seattle to here in 1996 because for at least twenty years now I've continued to repeatedly buy a couple of new pair in order to put off doing the laundry for a few more days. Unfortunately I cannot afford to do that anymore. I can barely afford to do laundry but one must have clean clothes so oatmeal it will be for the next week. But fortunately I have amassed so much underclothing that I can go for months without doing the wash.
And so I do. Because what is a more hateful chore than going to the laundromat? That is a rhetorical question. Everyone knows there is no more hateful chore than going to the laundromat.
Unless there is one nearby that is open 24 hours a day. Then it is slightly less hateful because there are fewer people in the middle of the night and thus row upon row of washers and dryers wait emptily for your dirty clothes. And the laundromat that is nearby and is open 24 hours also charges less per load between midnight and 6 or 7am. So that is when the nocturnal poor do their laundry. The rest of the time the place is mobbed.
I am back from the laundromat. I have not unpacked my clean clothes because I am too worn out from hauling them down the street and back. I am thinking of weighing them before I unpack them tomorrow just to see what I did manage to burden myself with. I think I pulled every muscle in my back and possibly some of yours but right now ibuprofen is taking care of inflamation so when I wake up in another 12 to 15 hours I will probably then know precisely which muscles I trashed.
The sad thing is that there is actually a bit more laundry to do. I need to wash a bunch of towels and the bathroom rug but there is a limit to how many muscles I am willing to sacrifice at one time. So with some determination perhaps I can really finish the job next time I am awake at night. Because actually, once I was there? Not so bad. I mean I still lost three hours of my life to watching bad tv in between checking to see if I had used enough or too much soap or if anything was dry enough to pull out so that the hot air it was taking up could be released to absorb water from something still damp.
And I think to myself that I will never let it pile this high again. But I know myself pretty well. I might want to go back to lifting weights so that next time I can carry twice as much.
This entry was composed @Dreamwidth.
Feel free to comment either here or there.
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Old friends and circle members know that I own an obscene number of socks and a semi-obscene number of pairs of underwear. When we lived in the warehouse in downtown Seattle in the early 90s I developed the habit of buying new socks and underwear when I ran out because it was such on unwieldy process to do laundry there. There were no laundromats nearby so lisagail and I would have to pack up all the dirty clothes and linens and towels and blankets and put them in the van--which was purchased mainly to haul musical equipment but worked well for lots of other things--and drive to some laundromat hoping that there would be both parking and unoccupied washers and dryers. Somehow it was much worse than walking to the laundromat is now even though I did not have to carry 50 pounds of laundry on my back down the sidewalk in the middle of the night because it back and pwas in the van and we did laundry during the day like more normal folk.
Not that we were normal folk. We were both diurnal back then though.
But so I have a large collection of socks and underwear some of which came with me from Seattle to here in 1996 because for at least twenty years now I've continued to repeatedly buy a couple of new pair in order to put off doing the laundry for a few more days. Unfortunately I cannot afford to do that anymore. I can barely afford to do laundry but one must have clean clothes so oatmeal it will be for the next week. But fortunately I have amassed so much underclothing that I can go for months without doing the wash.
And so I do. Because what is a more hateful chore than going to the laundromat? That is a rhetorical question. Everyone knows there is no more hateful chore than going to the laundromat.
Unless there is one nearby that is open 24 hours a day. Then it is slightly less hateful because there are fewer people in the middle of the night and thus row upon row of washers and dryers wait emptily for your dirty clothes. And the laundromat that is nearby and is open 24 hours also charges less per load between midnight and 6 or 7am. So that is when the nocturnal poor do their laundry. The rest of the time the place is mobbed.
I am back from the laundromat. I have not unpacked my clean clothes because I am too worn out from hauling them down the street and back. I am thinking of weighing them before I unpack them tomorrow just to see what I did manage to burden myself with. I think I pulled every muscle in my back and possibly some of yours but right now ibuprofen is taking care of inflamation so when I wake up in another 12 to 15 hours I will probably then know precisely which muscles I trashed.
The sad thing is that there is actually a bit more laundry to do. I need to wash a bunch of towels and the bathroom rug but there is a limit to how many muscles I am willing to sacrifice at one time. So with some determination perhaps I can really finish the job next time I am awake at night. Because actually, once I was there? Not so bad. I mean I still lost three hours of my life to watching bad tv in between checking to see if I had used enough or too much soap or if anything was dry enough to pull out so that the hot air it was taking up could be released to absorb water from something still damp.
And I think to myself that I will never let it pile this high again. But I know myself pretty well. I might want to go back to lifting weights so that next time I can carry twice as much.
This entry was composed @Dreamwidth.
Feel free to comment either here or there.
Post@Dreamwidth | Comments@Dreamwidth