If I were more industrious I would go back and see how many times I've lamented about the loathsome job of doing laundry. It, like washing dishes, is such a bother. Wash, dry, take care of and repeat for the rest of your life.
The few times that every article of clothing (save what we were wearing), kitchen towel and assorted linens has been clean and folded and taken care of are such sweet times. I like to see empty hampers, laundry baskets, a spacious and empty laundry room and a pool table not covered in clothes.
Then I squander that precious time of having nothing taunting me in the hamper by fretting about other chores that need to be done to make the house perfect. If the dishes are done and the toys are picked up then are the windows sparkly clean? The bathroom spotless? How about the grout lines in the kitchen - how long has it been since I took a toothpick to them?
Nutso, I know.
Last week Ryan invited a friend over to play pool.
There was only one problem.
The pool table. It was covered - every square inch - with clean clothes, piles of stuff to go to Goodwill, to save for so and so, to be moved to the garage/kitchen/bookshelf/boys room...
One evening Ryan spent an hour and a half tackling the pool table.
It took him 90 minutes to fold all of those clothes and sort through the piles of stuff. And he goes pretty fast at it, too. There is no precision folding going on.
Maybe I should slack a little on the precision and just go with the whole 'getting it done and over with' method. I'm the only one who cares if the sheets are folded so well that you can't tell which is a flat sheet and which is a folded sheet. The boys don't balk if the towels in the linen closet do not have all of their edges matched up perfectly. Or if the edge sides or round folded sides are not all facing the same direction.
Geez, just writing about this makes me want to go straighten out the linen closet. The towels are folded all wonky and there is a huge stack of yellow shop cloths in front of the bath towels. The wash cloths are not stacked by style (in the following order: the white ones with pink trim, sand colored ribbed ones from our wedding registry, white ones from my mom 2 Christmases ago) and baby washcloths are mixed in with them and they are stacked so high the tower of wash cloths is falling over ....
Wait.
I need to go get a brown paper bag.
*********
Just kidding. Sort of. I'm not hyperventilating but I do think I've got myself plenty worked up about the state of the linen closet.
Sheesh. Now I have to worry about the linen closet in addition to the hallway full of stuff I need to clear out. It's been 5 years in the making but I reached my tipping point in our tiny bedroom. Our bedroom set is lovely. Really. Very pretty, solid wood, blah, blah, blah. It is also freaking HUGE. We will gain 18 inches of precious space by removing our head and foot boards. I cleared the top of my dresser (into a laundry basket, the contents and which are in the hallway sitting on top of my nightstand - which I also emptied in order to move it to the guest room) so I could work on emptying the dresser so I can take the dresser out of the room.
On Sunday or Monday we are going to get a platform bed that has storage underneath. The one drawer full of clothes that I couldn't arrange neatly in the closet are going in those drawers. We will be down 3 really bulky pieces. Our room will feel like a calm and spacious oasis.
Now I just need to get Ryan to take the boys to his mom's or dad's house for the weekend so I can paint the bedroom... and living room... and dining room....
I feel relaxed just thinking about the vision it's going to be. Now I just have to work on my sales pitch to Ryan about my color choices. Half of my pitch is about his lack of labor involvement and the other half will have to be made up of trust (see how nice the bathroom turned out? You doubted that, remember?) and my big brown eyes looking at him all sweet and doe like.
So the whole reason I started this post was because I had this novel idea about something new I'm trying: folding laundry one load at time. When a load needs to go in the dryer I fold the one already in there instead of piling the clean clothes on top of the dryer, then the washer then the pool table.
It's been 3 days and it is going beautifully.
The other new thing I was going to try and have already failed miserably at is a short blog post. Since I like to write but finding the time to do it when I have enough uninterrupted time and energy is kind of hard I thought I would just write a small post about doing laundry. But then I start in on tangents.
Oy. The tangents.
That reminds me about this time in the 9th grade when I learned what a tangent was...
