Wednesday, November 15, 2023

The perils of doing the household laundry


On the surface, doing the laundry seems like a harmless enough task. When you live with other people, however, and particularly when you're married, there are pitfalls you would never have anticipated.

I do our laundry  and by "our" laundry, I mean Terry's and mine  once and sometimes twice a week. I always do it first thing in the morning on Mondays when I work from home. Then on Fridays, when I'm also working from home, I'll wash anything Terry wasn't able to get to the previous day.

It used to be that I folded all of the clothes I washed. Then Terry requested I just leave hers unfolded because, honestly, I couldn't figure out which of her clothes went where in the closet, and therefore she was constantly searching for things I had misplaced.

I'm sure she also didn't like the way I folded a lot of it, as I'm not exactly an expert in that department.

That's all fair enough. I would love to be more helpful, but her system of clothes storage baffles me. And seeing as how Terry has put some of my clothes away in the wrong place over time, I get it.

Recently, though, I stepped on another laundry land mine.

Terry often deposits clothes she has worn on the bathroom floor. In another attempt to be helpful, I was scooping up those clothes on Monday and Friday mornings and taking them down to be washed.

But, as it turns out, Terry often wants to re-wear these discarded garments. A few times she walked into the bathroom to fetch one only to find it had been taken away for undesired laundering.

So now I leave the clothes on the floor. I had to learn the hard way.

All of this is on top of the times I haul a basket full of clothes to the laundry room and quickly discover that Jack is doing his laundry, and thus both the washer and dryer are unavailable for use.

Laundry is a chore I actually enjoy doing, but even with the best of intentions, there have been times when it would have been better for Terry had I simply not done it in the first place.

You live and learn.

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