Laundry fun with Erl

Who says doing laundry is tedious and boring? You wouldn't if you were doing laundry with me.

So this past weekend I thought I was being frugal (i.e. smart + cheap) when I decided to take my laundry home to do instead of spending the $1.75 per load here at school. Sadly, like so many other times in my life, I was not smart. See the thing is no one in my home told me that the dryer was broken. Well, not completely broken, it's just developed a special "quirk." It still tumbles and blows air onto your clothes, that air just isn't hot. So after the first load had run through the drying phase of cleansing the clothes, I realized I had a problem on my hands. I had one load of "dried" clothes that was still quite damp and a load in the wash that would be in desperate need of hot tumbling. (That sounds kind of kinky reading it over "hot tumbling." We should start bring that into common conversation, but I digress.)

According to my sister, I shouldn't just take 2-3 weeks of damp/wet laundry back to school to dry tomorrow because there is a good chance of the clothes developing an all so interesting mildew-y smell. I thought it would be ok, but I didn't want to run the risk of releasing fungi spores while I walked around Westwood or smelling bad. Again thinking I was being smart, I did what anyone in my situation would do. I began to hang my clothes all around my house using the following items: hangers (naturally), a rarely used treadmill, dining room chairs, a couple of strategically placed broom handles + door, an outdoor garden lattice, and stairway banisters. I would have just hung all of my clothes from hangers, had I had enough hangers. I found all of 7 not being used in some capacity hangers (not all the hangers in use in my home are holding up clothes, a couple seemed to be integral to the shutting of a door). I had to get creative. I mean I didn't look very hard for hangers, I only went through one closet. Everyone knows that the combination of desperation and laziness sets the perfect conditions for creativity. That's why when my Mama woke up in the morning and walked down the stairs she had to dodge my pillow shams and duck under my comforter duvet.

Of course however, my Mom had to make me not smart again by showing me that the dryer did in fact still have some heating capacity to it. She pushed ONE frigging button and some hot air did start to warm the machine up. It still wasn't what it ought to have been (the machine is pretty old). Anyways, while it took me about 10 hours (and several pieces of furniture, home accessories, and gardening equipment) to not dry my clothes or bed sheets, it took my mother 3 hours (one hour devoted to laughing at me) to get the job done.

Moral of the blog:
Drying clothes in the dorms: $0.75.
Displaying my genius talent of clothes hanging to mi familia: priceless.