Laundry

Before this whole grad school thing, I had very little to do with the laundry, besides wearing it. I occasionally would put a load in the wash, and this was usually when we were all out of underwear. Anything else and I could usually find a suitable alternative, or just wear the item dirty. Not underwear though. For some strange reason, people find that corn chip smell offensive. Go figure.

Here, we don't have a washer/dryer in our apartment (it would take up half the apartment). Instead we have washing facilities, or in other words, a laundromat. Now I had used these types of facilities before when I was in the MTC, but I remember them being much nicer, like the fact that they actually worked.
Here they work, kind of. You just have to avoid the big ones. So as I have been trying to establish some type of routine other than put the kids in front of the TV and pray they are entertained until Mollie's nap, I needed to designate some laundry day(s). The first time though was quite a large undertaking, because it had been over a week since laundry had been done, and in our family, if you even touch it once, it's dirty and needs to be laundered. This is slightly different from when I was single when you didn't wash the towel until it started to emit an odor (notice how I said Towel, yep I only had one). Now I have over a dozen, in various states of disrepair (I would say repair, but that would be a lie). The oldest is a towel I got as a senior in High School that has my name, year and wrestling weight embroidered on it. I was saving it initially to put in a memory box and altar with all the stuff from high school that made me amazing (3rd place medals, participation awards, etc) but it was soon sacrificed on the altar of poor college students.

Back to laundry. Kara learned something when we were younger and that is don't start doing something in a relationship unless you plan on doing it the entire relationship. She would pay the bills, cook dinner (most of the time) do the laundry, and other things. I would take out the trash, iron everything that needed to be ironing (which was mostly my shirts anyway), yardcare, etc. You get the idea. In this stage of our life Kara has subconsciously decided that I will do the laundry, and her method is such that she spends her time doing things like homework, school and something called clinic, while the laundry piles up. I would ignore the laundry, but it eventually gets in the way of my TV watching, literally. I can't see around the laundry to watch La La Loopsy (that's the most stimulating show I get to watch these days). So out of desperation, I do laundry.

By the time I am desperate enough to do the laundry, it has piled up to the point of needing several machines. There are also bigger machines that you can use that cost just a little bit more, it they work. This time it didn't. The problem here is that I had already loaded all the laundry, all the detergent, and all the bleach into the washer.

Crap!

I found three other smaller washers and carefully ran the now semi-moist laundry to the new washers, all the time trying to avoid getting bleach on my clothes. It worked.

Another time I was trying to bring all the laundry down at once (an amazing, yet impossible feat) and I dropped the bleach. This wouldn't have been a problem if it hadn't have opened..... on the carpet. Don't worry though, I cleaned it up real nice. And to fix the problem I used an assortment of sharpie markers to re-color the carpet. This is where my Art degree has come in handy. Look you can't even tell the difference.