Gotta hang 'em out early; I hope the sun comes out

[austin_dern]

There are many things I haven't done before in my life, but one of them I recently did for the first time: I finally bought clothes rather than doing laundry.

It's not that I was too lazy to do laundry. The problem is the dryer had developed this habit of occasionally burning clothes, and after months of this my mother finally made my father do something to fix it. At first my father thought it could be fixed by fiddling around with this little marble that somehow the drum turns against, which looked good in that it forced us to squeeze the dryer out of the impossibly constrained space, but didn't actually work. After some effort, including sending me to the library to see if the reference desk knew anything about fixing dryers (they didn't, but they carefully showed me how to look it up online), my father determined we needed to get a new belt, and he couldn't get it until Monday.

Initially I was pretty well set for this because by luck I'd done all my laundry the night before the dryer went out of operation. However, and even though I somehow don't have room to put clothes in my dresser because there's other clothes in there, that's really only good for about a week and change worth of dressing, particularly with things like wearing something else for yoga. I was getting near running out and had no evidence the part would be in Monday, or fixed by that process.

And so I went about the K-mart and Target looking for laundry racks: I could at least use the washer and leave things to dry, or at least to be licked by the cats who like water on demand. Yes, certainly I could buy a laundry rack ... which I would need for maybe two loads of laundry and then maybe not again ever ... or, for about the same price, I could buy a couple of shorts (which is what I was really running out of), which I could use here and indefinitely far into the future.

And that's how I concluded it was economically preferable to buy clothes rather than to do laundry.

Footnote: there's something a touch odd about having the first moments of The Price Is Right interrupted by President Bush trying to explain how the immolation of the financial industry and the sale of every company to every other company in case somebody has money left over is really just good news on the installment plan. But on the bright side, Washington Mutual won a globe made of precious stones and a recumbent bike, and then $6,000 in the Showcase Showdown, nearly doubling its net worth.

Trivia: Charles Merrill and Edmund Lynch merged their firms into Merrill Lynch and Company in 1916. The partnership papers accidentally omitted the comma between their names, and they stuck with it. Source: An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.

Currently Reading: Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe, Thomas Cahill. Man, I haven't seen a popular-history book illuminated before.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

While I don't think that buying more shorts is a bad idea, and solves both short-term and long-term lacks of clothing..

I can't help thinking what I did the last time my washer or was it dryer broke down and I needed more clean clothing, which is, to go to the laundromat.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't even know where a laundry around here is, which cut that option off from me. I felt like it'd be a little odd to drive around the streets with a bag of laundry in my car hoping I might see one.

(It turns out that Laundromat is actually a specific franchise with one corporate overlord, too; who knew?)

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well. Perhaps investigation in a phone book, which would rather conveniently display a list under a heading such as "Laundries" or "Clothing - Laundry" or "Citrus Fruits and Washing Machines".

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, now you're just being silly. Who would put a phone into a book? Or make a book into a phone?

(Where the phone book, assuming there is one, is around here is a secret guarded better even than the location of the brooms.)

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

You should definitely go for bamboo poles on the ceiling. Those worked surprisingly well. ;^)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I did long for a good set of poles, but installing them would be a bigger project than just the couple loads of laundry would be. It did make me regret leaving behind (actually, donating to the Salvation Army) my little fold-out plastic clothes rack, since that would have fit pretty well in the shower stall and allowed me to dry stuff off while controlling how much the cats licked.

And I didn't realize how easy those were to find in Singapore until I started looking for some around here.