Living retired — ‘AIRING DIRTY LAUNDRY’
Living Retired – ‘AIRING DIRTY LAUNDRY’
Here is my spin on washing the clothes in our household: it is a tag team event.
First, Jan and I wrestle pulling apart the rolled up balls of dirty socks scrunched inside out.
Then like a Japanese sumo wrestler takes his opponent to the floor, Jan grabs the laundry hamper and violently heaves it upside down! THUD! Dirty clothes flood the laundry room floor: 90% hers, 10% mine. Just saying…
“Gary, we need to separate all these clothes into loads.”
Soon, Jan is up to her waist in the massive mound on the floor!
By my count we end up with nine piles, or in laundry lowdown: loads.
There is the dark load. The light load. The bright load. And the white load.
But there is more!
There is the jeans load. The towel load. The delicate load. And the special garments load.
There is also what Jan says is the “Whatever you do Gary, DO NOT SCREW THIS LOAD UP!”
Peering out over our laundry room floor it looks like the Andes Mountain range: nine separate piles of wool, cotton, linen, silk, polyester, and something called ‘viscose’ – which intimidates the lights and brights out of me!
Now it is time for me to ‘do the laundry.’ Well not so fast Mr. Clean…
Before I can make our whites whiter and our brights brighter, I retrieve a small bag that hangs in our laundry room. I call it our ‘single sock sack’ where all the single socks accumulate, waiting for a match to come along. It is like the online dating site eHarmony, but for socks!
“Jan, there are so many solo socks here you must be walking around with cold feet!”
Each week the single sock sack grows bigger. Last week I threatened to stretch them out into legwarmers for Jan – albeit mismatched legwarmers.
Now it is time for me to ‘do the laundry.’ Well not so fast Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Liquid Fabric Softener…
Before I can say ‘Tide’s In, Dirt’s Out’ I need to do my laundry rant…
“Jan, how many clothes do we have? Do we have to wear this many clothes?”
This is met with Jan’s rant: “Whatever you do Gary do not screw my clothes up!”
Jan has good reason to be concerned about me doing the laundry…
One time I washed a pair of her brand new leggings. They were red and when I removed them from the washing machine they had shrunk down to the size of a pair of hot pants. And that was before I tossed them into the dryer and set the dial to ‘Scorch.’
Jan has never let me forget her expensive sweater that I shrunk to something that would fit her Barbie doll she had as a child. Lets just say that Jan has the patience of the Maytag Lonely Repairman.
“Gary, if you are writing about doing the laundry you must mention the time all your paper Canadian Tire money you saved in a shoebox got wet, so you put it all into the dryer to dry. You were money laundering!”
Jan does not know this but the first thing I do is combine loads. I try to reduce nine loads down to three, four at tops. The dark load, the jeans load, and anything that appears to be somewhat ‘dark-ish’ gets crammed into one massive load in the washing machine. The second load consists of the bright load, the light load and oh what the heck the special garments load!
The trick is to move fast! The faster I can get things washed, dried, folded, and put away before Jan comes into the laundry room, the better. If she does catch me I will threaten to throw in the towel.
The term ‘wash separately’ has a different meaning in our household.
