Mar. 31: Washer woman

This morning I found a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit marathon going on the USA network. I think they do them every Tuesday. You know what happens when you don’t turn off the TV at the end of a Law & Order episode? The next one starts and you have to watch the whole thing. You have to. It’s, like, the law in Law & Order, I think.

I had things to do at my desk for about an hour, so I kept busy while I watched. But after that I felt guilty not doing anything else BUT watching, and I knew I could easily waste the whole day in front of the TV. So I went upstairs to find something productive to do. Aha! Laundry!

There were quite a few loads to run, as well as piles of clean things that had been left on the table in the laundry room. Those things needed to be folded and put away, and that would take a long time. I had pa-lenty to keep me busy for the whole L&O: SVU marathon. Yay. (Pssst. Don’t tell Victor, but I kinda like doing laundry. It’s a pain to keep up with, but completing it is quite satisfying.)

But wait! I discovered two hampers in the laundry room that were full of clothes. I knew one of them had clean clothes in it—there were dryer sheets in there—but I couldn’t tell if the other stuff was clean or dirty. Because who puts clean clothes in a hamper??? My husband does, that’s who.

Now, using the hamper to get clothes from the laundry room to the bedroom for folding would be efficient if they were taken out of the hamper immediately so as not to confuse them with clothes in hampers that had not yet been washed. But it appears that someone else in my house that does the laundry does not think about that. It is very, very frustrating for the other people in my house, particularly me.

I cannot express to you how difficult it is for me to leave the above paragraph un-bolded and un-huge-ified and un-emailed anonymously to Victor.

Don’t give me that “at least your husband does laundry” stuff. I’m lucky he does the laundry, I know. But if he leaves clean clothes in a hamper, where dirty clothes belong, then there’s a good chance they’ll just end up getting washed again. So “my husband does the laundry” is actually more like “my husband moves things around the house and leaves me to wonder if those things have already been washed or not so I wash them again to be on the safe side and then nobody really wins.”

There’s a happy ending. I got to watch the marathon most the day without feeling super guilty. The table in the laundry room has been cleared, the hampers are empty, and our dresser drawers are full. Yep, it feels good.