Laundry

Today kinda sucks. I didn't eat dinner last night, outside of a small PB & J quesadilla at 5 PM, and then played in a football game, before beginning my night of drinking. Needless to say, when I drink on a relatively empty stomach, I feel like shit the next day. Add to that the dehydration of the football game and the fact that I worked the whole day on Friday outside in the rain, and voila.

I didn't get out of bed until around 12:30 and that's because my dog had me concerned she was gonna pee or poop on the floor if I didn't let her out. As it was, she was up at 9 when my girlfriend got up for work, and refused to go back to sleep unless I let her jump on the bed with me. It's against the rules, but my head was hurting and I really didn't want to deal with her barking at 9. Stupid dog. She destroyed her own bed, perhaps figuring with it out of the way, she'd have to be allowed in our bed. Worked this time, maybe not that stupid after all.

So I'm finally up, dog pissed outside, and I open my closet to see it. The laundry pile. It's pretty much been staring me in the face for about three weeks, getting larger each day, with the exception of the socks my dog grabs everytime she gets a chance and distributes throughout the house. I swore I was going to do it last week, but I got sidetracked...can't remember with what.

Now the pile is about 4 feet by 4 feet and about two feet high.

Luckily, I'm an old pro at procrastinating and I own more than a months worth of underwear to prevent this from being a true disaster. However, today I've got to try to clear it up.

When I lived in my apartment, "laundry day" wasn't really a day, it was only an hour and a half. There were three washers and dryers on every floor and I was not above using up to six of them at a time. Two games of Madden later and I was done. Now, it's a marathon.

One washer, one dryer and they're not even on the same floor that I sleep on. Doing my laundry should be an aerobic class. I should put up some flyers at the local gym and have some chick who thinks she has cottage cheese thighs come over and walk these two flights of stairs hauling my clothes all day. After my first trek, I was truly out of breath, but I really felt the burn. It was a good burn. A deep burn. Something is being accomplished.

I don't think I actually do laundry right. My girlfriend always separates her clothes by like color, fabric material, season, size...honestly there's like 8 or so piles when she's done. I just grab a pile big enough to fit in my laundry basket, overflowing slightly as I've found that's about one-loads worth. Everything gets washed in WARM-COLD. I've heard hot water can shrink things so I steer clear of that, and I really don't feel I'm getting a real cleaning if there's not some warmth to the water. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

I always dry stuff on a lower setting, again not to destroy anything, but it makes it take longer. In my apartment, drying on low wouldn't dry anything in the time I paid for, so I suffered a few losses and loose underwear elastic as a result of the higher heat. Now, I just wait.

I'm smart enough to know (after destroying a shirt by accident, and shrinking another one) that I don't even try to wash sweaters or shirts that say "dry clean only." Those simply sit on the closet floor for about five months until the stars align and my girlfriend goes to the dry cleaners and mentions this to me and I remember that I have a shirt that needs to be dry cleaned and I can find this shirt and she remembers to take it the next day. I'm serious, I had a button up shirt that I wore once and it sat on my closet floor until I moved, and since it was in my car during the move, I left it there, and eventually my dad mentioned that he was going to the drycleaners...and now it's back on the floor because I wore it again.

So right now, I have one load in the dryer and one load in the washer. When these clothes are dry, that will be my first complete load...and I've been at this for a little over an hour now. I'm not even at the runner's high point yet. Perhaps I could delve into an extended metaphor between doing my laundry and running a marathon, but I'm too tired to be creative at this point.

Stupid laundry day. I need some water.