I love doing laundry (not so much putting it away), but I don't do it that often because I like to save energy (and work) by washing a lot of clothes at once (I can't recall who is the other blogger I read who does the same, I don't know anyone in real life like this -- please shout out if it's you!).* I separate the dark clothes (which take at least 2-3 weeks accumulation in summer to make a load and about a week to a week and a half in winter, we wear more dark clothing then), but that's it, I hardly ever do loads of whites. I wash towels and sheets together with our clothes and... once in a long while, I do a load of hand washables or "delicate" clothes. This "concentrated washing" of big loads is the main reason why last year I broke my clothesline one warm January day when the temperature went up to the 60s (check out photos here).
I guess I mentioned briefly before that we haven't used our drier since last December, when we were forced to buy a new washer. We decided to upgrade the washer and didn't go with the cheapest and simplest front loading Kenmore model, so the old drier won't fit on top of the new one, so it can't be installed in our hallway "closet" laundry, unless we build a wooden "podium" for it to perch on top of the washer. The problem is the exhaust duct that is too big for the lower part of the "closet-style" laundry and if we install the drier, we cannot close the folding doors...
This sporadic laundering is only possible because we do have lots of clothes, particularly underwear. Late this summer I had a really good laugh with my mom because I hadn't done laundry for some weeks and my husband had already complained he was running out of underwear, so as we were hanging the clothes outside I set out to count how many pairs of his boxer shorts I could find in the wash. It turns out there were 22!! So, I hadn't done laundry for twenty-two days!
Then, the weather turned bad and I didn't have enough room in my basement to hang everything. The next day my dad installed more lines, but first, he tried a new experiment in space saving clothes hanging:
(It didn't really work that well, even with the dehumidifier turned on high -- there were just too many clothes to dry without that musty smell)Well, now I have to get to the title of the post and into how it is related to laundry, right? I don't know exactly why, but one day this summer I showed Kelvin what that convenient "hole" in his underpants was for and he became an enthusiastic user of the strategic opening. Meanwhile, his little brother, who always has to do whatever his older brother does, realized that most of his underwear, including many pairs that came from Brazil and some of these handy "training pants," did not have the hole, only a sewn detail pretending to be an opening. He was very upset by this because he also wanted to use the opening! All of a sudden, his three Bob the Builder underpants became his favorites and he began to ask for them everyday, so I soon had to go out and buy him more underwear, in spite of the fact that he already had tons! (and I went ahead and donated the training pants to someone who would need them more than us)
Then some weeks later, when I was doing laundry I realized something strange -- there was a significantly higher number of pairs of underwear for Linton than for Kelvin (18 against 12, I think). And then I remembered the holes, and the fact that some days when he realized that he was wearing one of the "hole-less" pairs, Linton would go change into another pair. In other occasions he would need a new pair of underpants because using the opening had caused some accidental leaking... So, yeah, that's my (rather lame, I now realize) story, and I can't believe I'm writing a post about boys' underpants in the blog! :-) I thought I would be able to make it into a more humorous story, but I have to apologize for my lack of comic skills. Well, I guess the next and more natural step will be to go ahead and purchase some Captain Underpants books for the boys, what d'ya think?
* (I do have more to say about this ;-) As a matter of fact, I always feel a little bad when I see my sister-in-law or MIL doing countless small loads of laundry -- I sometimes think that their clothes are much cleaner than mine (and SIL really are, she swears by old top loaders, which is what she has). Now, MIL has a front-loader too, and I do feel bad at times knowing that it could hold way more clothes in each load. I guess it's just a habit that people have -- doing small loads. My first ever washer, back in 1994 when I got married, was a front-loader (something very rare in Brazil at the time) that I received as a wedding gift from my best friends' parents (it was in my gift list -- I could/should blog about that sometime, the gifts I got for my wedding, tons and tons of stuff!). I read the manual carefully and it said I could wash 4kg (around 8.8 lbs) of clothes in it, so sometimes I would actually use a kitchen scale and weight my laundry! I know, geeky me. So, I've always done big mixed loads.
No comments:
Post a Comment