It’s summer, and that means that the cat hair problem is reaching critical mass. One place where it has clearly already reached Hair Crisis is somewhere way down in the washing machine drain, so that after half the water has drained, the drain backs up and overflows the other half onto the laundry room floor. Which is cement and all, but the only responsible way to handle a load of laundry is to stand over the washer and shut it off at the penultimate moment (if you’re watching and listening carefully), let it sit several minutes, and then let it finish.
Not only is that just complete bullshit when it’s 96 degrees outside, it’s doing a number on the washing machine gears. I have one last Massive Drano Assault planned - a two-prong attack based at the washer drain and the kitchen drain, where the wash water blurbles up momentarily on its way to overflowing in the laundry room and so I assume is closer to the clog - before I give up and call the Rooter.
So very little laundry gets done, and I suppose it’s good that we have more towels than we know what to do with, three sets of sheets, and a lot of clothes, but we’re surrounded by mountains of “less important” laundry that has nowhere to live, and also we’re sick of it. I’ve been in a very bad slump of “can’t have anything nice” lately, and this isn’t helping.
Anyway, with this whole cat hair critical mass thing going on, there is just a constant onslaught of shed and puke, and you just don’t want to not be able to do laundry under those circumstances. And on top of the shed and the puke and the sleeping on piles of laundry, the cats eventually decide that if it’s just piled on the floor like that, they might as well piss on it too. We’ve had a number of unpleasant surprises lately, and it turns out that if you don’t do laundry often, and something got pissed on a while back, you have to pre-treat if you don’t want to put on a “clean shirt” that springs a nasty olfactory surprise on you as soon as you step out into the heat.
Oh, also, there had been fleas, and the coating of all animals in toxins to kill them (the fleas, not the animals…yet). So everything needed to be washed.
So this morning we went to the laundromat.
I haven’t not had a washer and dryer since I graduated from college. And in college, I lived around the corner from This Sud’s For You, a laundromat/bar with cheap drafts and decent fried mushrooms, so laundry day didn’t entirely suck.
Well, now I live in the suburbs where they eschew laundromats, and there’s only two in a 10-mile radius. The first one was closed indefinitely. The second one’s parking lot was roped off to be repaved and painted, and we had to park a long, hot trek away from the entrance.
The one real bonus to going to the Kwik Wash is that you can wash all your comforters in less than a week. So there’s that. But it’s been a long time since This Sud’s For You, and I put our darks in the triple-load commercial front-loaders…with only one load’s worth of detergent and fabric softener (we didn’t have enough whites for the triples, so they got enough). So after all the clothes were dried and I was folding them, I felt all empty inside without the comforting smell of Spring Rain or April Showers or whatever I bought this time.
And then the stank smell hit me from a shirt in my hand. So, nearly done drying and folding just about everything we own, I had to re-wash a load of darks to bring home wet and dry for free.
At which point I noticed that my favorite laundry basket, the tall one, was missing. We’d stopped for lunch on the way home, so you know that baby was gone. Again: I can’t have anything nice. B tried to go out and get another one and came home instead with two of those newfangled curvy rectangular baskets that don’t collapse as soon as you press them against your hip, which is fine because we can throw away the ones that are falling apart, but…it’s not my tall hamper, and I want my tall hamper. And I want the perfectly good one I already had instead of spending money on a new one. So the cost of this laundry trip will eventually be like $40, which is bullshit except that, you know, clean clothes and comforters.
I tried to vacuum while the bedroom was laundry-pile free, but the vacuum is leaving long trails of cat hair that are too stuck to the carpet to come up. I have a solution for this: in a spray bottle, mix a capful of fabric softener with a bottle of water. Mist, let dry 15-20 minutes, then vacuum. The Downy breaks some of the static holding the hair down.
Yeah, I can’t find my bottle, and I really don’t feel like gunking up yet another bottle when I know that the old bottle will turn up mere seconds after I do so.
Postscript, 7/6/04 So I got up this morning and went to the closet to get my tan pants.
No tan pants.
Hm, I thought. What about B’s khaki pants? I turned and looked through his side of the closet.
No khaki pants.
Shit.
I went and asked B if he had any general awareness of light brown pants, white shirts, that sort of thing. No.
Can’t. have. anything. nice. There was weeping, and possibly some hissing and wailing and gnashing. I couldn’t remember exactly how large the light load was, but I knew there was at least the two pair of pants (and I’m desperately short on pants right now, so every pair is incredibly important AND these were my newest pants too) and a bra and some underwear. There goes groceries for the next 10 days, I thought, because there some stuff I can technically do without for a while, but pants and underwear aren’t those things.
At least having two cars allowed me the futility of driving across town just to see if maybe just possibly they were still there. Which they wouldn’t be. I’ve left shit in laundromats before. I know what happens. I figured there was a tiny off chance that if we left that load in a washer and not a dryer, it might not have been worth somebody’s time to take them, or maybe most people would assume it belonged to the Bundle Service ladies. Tiny chance.
And yep, left them in a washer, and they were still there 20 hours later. Not even funky. I could have taken them home and put them in the free dryer, but I decided I’d sacrifice a quarter to the laundromat gods and dry them there.
I checked every washer and dryer before I left.