Laundry. No, FRELLING laundry
I am sooo looking forward to stomping down the main street toward Peter’s washing machine carrying a large backpack full of dirty laundry.
Described it this morning on Twitter like this: Got home last night* to dead washing machine full of WATER & wet, soapy, dirty clothes. Joy. Fixer man cn’t cm till nxt Tues, MORE joy.
Last night I wasted most of an hour trying to persuade the wretched apparatus to finish what it had started. Failed.** It lay there making moaning noises and spasming feebly. And—just by the way—it’s a front loader, and the door locks when there’s water inside. This is a good thing, except for the watching through the window at my clothing developing long green beards of water weed. I eventually BAILED IT BY HAND. Very, very long-term readers of this blog may recollect a washing-machine rant long, long ago on lj, in which I imprecated the designers of washing machines who include a filter—oh, a filter, sounds good so far, you think?—which is protected, as Ladon the golden apples, by a special arcane vessel containing dirty water. I have no idea why the dirty water is necessary. But it means every time you want to clean the filter—of, perhaps, critter hair—you have to bleed off the dirty water first. This whole agglomeration lurks behind a small trap door about a palm’s-breadth up from the floor . . . which means the largest vessel you can use for dirty-water-catching purposes is only about three inches deep. A cereal bowl, say.***
I bailed out a full washing machine cereal bowlful by cereal bowlful last night.
It took a long time.
What’s going to be even more fun is walking down main street carrying a large backpack full of wet, soapy dirty laundry.
Meanwhile I spent way too long writing last night’s entry so I am going to be SHORT tonight. SHORT. SHORT: lasting or taking a small amount of time † ; relatively small in extent. But I thought you might like to see Rose of the Week. Do you remember that I raid the florist’s†† after bell ringing on Sunday? Cut flowers last so shockingly short††† a time I often take pictures of them because . . . because I am a nut case. I’m the only one who ever looks at the photos.‡ But there’s evanescent and then there’s, hey, I spent money for that thing I want to know it existed. ‡‡ Also, I was thinking, I need photos of flowers in January. And February. And March. . . . We may do this again. 
* * *
* Deeeeep dark secret I am about to REVEAL ON LINE because I am lame, silly and a narcissist. I am enjoying walking home at mmmph o’clock in the morning. And the hellhounds clearly do too.^ However it only works at mmmph o’clock in the morning; normal people are still walking their dogs at 11, and going home at midnight-thirty on a Saturday night because of frelling service ring Sunday morning the streets are like the blasted Riviera in July, and I think I’ve told you that the one dubious pub in this town ^^ is about eighty yards from my front door. ^^^
But a little bit later and it’s just you and the bats, and this time of year you don’t even have bats, and the night and the silence go on a very long way, and in that silence stories you weren’t expecting start whispering to you from the shadows. I get lazy about using Wolfgang to commute—for example if the snow had hit a few weeks ago, schlepping four hundred pages of manuscript hard copy back and forth in my knapsack would have got very old. And the sad creaky middle-aged truth is that even ten pounds of knapsack starts to make my vertebrae feel rather compressed after about twenty minutes, and, except at mmmph o’clock, hellhounds and I are usually going the long way. Some long way or other.^^^^
^ Ooooh! they say. To be abroad in the pit of darkness and, possibly, chaos! Oooooh! The only drawback is the hissing at them when we first saltate out the front door of the mews and commence to ricochet with excitement around the courtyard under everybody’s bedroom windows. All right, you can’t hiss No! and you can’t even hiss Ssssstop that! very effectively, but you know what I mean.
^^ I wonder how many of those heat-flushed drinkers this last Saturday woke up Sunday morning with exothermic head colds.
^^^ The cover versions of Smoke on the Water get really tedious by the end of a long hot summer. +
+ I’ve probably said this before, haven’t I? Consider it a mark of just how tedious.
^^^^ Two hours a day is a lot of walking. We need to take every opportunity to fill up our saltation card.
** Had an email from a friend that said, I’m in a crummy mood anyway, so it’s okay if I spend the evening folding laundry, right?
I one-upped the hell out of her.
*** Yes, I’ve tried bigger things—baking dishes and so on—but the slosh factor is rather diabolical.
† subheading: seeming to last less time than is the case; passing quickly
†† Another of my disturbingly ungreen habits, I’m afraid, like commuting in Wolfgang
††† Speaking of short
‡ Till now.
‡‡ For one brief shining moment. T H White was nowhere on roses, and neither were Lerner and Loewe. Feh on them.
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