My wife’s in Australia. She went over for the grandtwins’ fourth birthday and will stay for 2 months. That’s 2 months that I can devote to writing, and I’ve started on the sequel to The Black Orchestra.
Today, I decided I needed to wash some clothes as I’m running out of underwear. I put a load into the washing machine, added 2 soap tablets and fabric softener and a colour-catcher. Pressed the start/pause button and nothing happened. I opened the door and banged it closed again a few times. Still nothing.
Then I noticed a big dial marked with lots of options: quick cottons , quick, cottons, wool, synthetics, delicates, drain, rinse, spin, reverse thrusters, docking, main wash only, self-clean, intensive + U, intensive, colour, hygiene. This dial was parked at the top, marked “0”. Okay, so I had to make a choice here.
Over to the left, I found a series of buttons. I had to choose a temperature, a spin speed, and a load size. There were a few other buttons marked with strange hieroglyphs. I think one of those had something to do with the plasma flow rates for the warp engines. The other one was definitely for the inter-dimensional stabilizers. Either that or the inertia dampers. Anyway, I decided to ignore all those buttons. I’m sure the engineering department (aka my wife) would have pre-programmed these at their optimal settings. When did washing become so complicated? That machine is like a nuclear power station. And what smart Alec decided to do away with those nice, simple top-loaders?
Anyway, I pressed start/pause and off it went. An LED on the front showed me what it was doing, wash, rinse, spin, and the estimated time to completion.
When it was finished I extracted my washing and wouldn’t you know it, I finished up with 2 odd socks, one grey, the other navy blue. I hunted high and low for the missing items, but without success. The tumble drier took most of the moisture from my clothes, but I had to drape them over the radiators to get them completely dry.
Six hours later, as I was folding the duvet cover I detected something lurking inside. Ah-ha, I thought, I bet this is where those pesky socks have been hiding. I poked my hand in and pulled out just one sock – a black one!
You know that lost socks turn into all of those extra hangers in your closet. You reminded me of dead husband that couldn’t figure out how to load new dishes in new dishwasher. He never tried to use the washing machine.
I had a front loader for a while, and was very happy to go back to a simple top loader… but I still sometimes lose socks.
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Marti: It’s gtting worse. I now have 4 orphan socks!
Karla: Check in Rebecca’s closet!