Wet clothes and cold water
The dryer repair professional comes today. Hopefully to take away our new purchased dryer (lemon) that arrived last week that worked for ten minutes and bring us a new one! But I'm not going into that story of numerous calls to 800 numbers. My hero Stan took care of those calls anyway.
Meantime, to tackle the mountain of laundry, we've been washing and hanging. But it has rained a lot this week, so the mountain has been growing, even while I suggest that maybe that pair of shorts could get one more wear (ignoring the mud) or that tshirt could last another day (with only a tiny popsicle stain). I couldn't stand it yesterday though, I braved the clouds and hung three loads. It was stressful! Is that a rain cloud? So we prayed against rain all day. Isn't that selfish?
The thing about it is that I like hanging clothes to dry. It reminds me of being a kid and my summer chore of hanging clothes. The fresh smell. The cool feel of wet sheets in the hot summer air. I mostly griped about it then, no doubt. I didn't appreciate then the exercise and puzzle solving involved - hauling baskets of wet clothes outside (and up basement stairs, though I didn't have those as a kid). And figuring out how to get one more pair of jeans on the crammed line, and marveling that back in my kid days, we didn't have huge bath "sheet" towels to hang. Those are tricky.
Another bonus is that you can match socks while you are hanging up your clothes and they don't disappear in the invisible black hole in the dryer! Lydia has helped me some with the hanging. Training up the next generation!
Maybe our dryer woes will be solved today. Maybe I'll keep hanging clothes when I can and when the weather complies. Trying to be green when we can.
The saddest part about all of this is that NONE of us have run out of clothes. Pretty crazy. We haven't had our favorite jeans to wear, and only one of us has been in a serious underwear crisis (even when wearing them for an extra day inside out - just kidding). But we have not suffered.
Too many clothes. Appalling.
We also got a new hot water heater, and timed it so we went only one day without hot water, after milking the last heater for every last drop since January. Pretty good, huh?
I'm grateful and humbled that God provides us with so much, and so many conveniences for this life in America. And for jobs that we can replace this stuff, and make other adjustments to the budget (like only eating beans for the rest of the summer, or forgetting about that vacation). I'm even grateful in a way that is causes so much aggravation to replace our conveniences so we appreciate them more, and think about what we really could do without. Hot water and dryers are pretty awesome - but those we've shared the earth with since creation didn't have them, til when, 50 years ago in America? And today - probably more than half the world still doesn't have them.
It's a challenge to make better use of the time we have back by not heating water over the open fire, or beating our clothes with rocks in the river before hanging them on tree branches.
Posted in: on Monday, April 30, 2007 at at 9:37 AM
