Laundry Day

It's official. Today is going to have to be Laundry Day.

I made this decision earlier when I observed not one, not two, but six, yes, six different piles of dirty clothing lying around in various corners of my house.



When it comes to laundry, I tend to procrastinate. It's not the act of placing clothes in a washer and then transferring them to an adjacent dryer that overwhelms me. Rather, it's the act of locating the various dirty clothing around my house, followed by the inevitable act of folding said clothing and putting it all away that makes me want to dig up every excuse in the book to save the laundry for another day.

There are also certain items that I especially dislike washing, including:

Fitted sheets. Tell me, how the heck is one supposed to go about folding a fitted sheet? The flat sheets are easy - they virtually collapse into perfect little rectangles for easy linen closet storage. The fitted sheets, on the other hand, are impossible to maneuver into any semblance of neatness. Every time I attempt to fold a fitted sheet , I end up with a wrinkled ball of 300-thread count cotton in the shape of a mangled rhombus.

Bathroom Hand Towels. It's not that hand towels are at all difficult to wash, dry, or fold; it's that I never seem to remember to replace the hand towels in my bathrooms once I've removed them from their usual locations. The result is that I tend to spend the next several hours uttering "oh, crap" every time I use the bathroom, wash my hands, and then realize that I don't have a towel to aid with the hand-drying process. The simple solution would be to remember to replace the dirty towels with fresh ones while the washer is doing its thing, but that would require me to retain that particular thought long enough to act upon it before feeling the urge to use the bathroom and inevitably getting swept into the wet hand cycle all over again.

Anything Made Out Of Denim. I think jeans today must be coated with some sort of anti-dry formula, because for some reason, it takes twice to three times as long to dry a pair of jeans than it does to dry a regular old pair of pants. When it comes to my jeans, there's a fine line between drying and shrinking, so by the time I've reached dry-cycle #3, I actually have to stand there and do a touch-test every three minutes to see if the jeans in question are actually dry. I then have to make sure to remove them as quickly as possible to avoid the shrinkage. Of course, what bothers me even more than the tedious process of watching a dryer is the feeling of freshly-washed jeans. Yes, it's nice to put on clean pants, but I absolutely detest the sensation of having stiff as a board jeans scrape their way up my legs, only to then refuse to button as I desperately suck in my midsection in attempt to aid in the process.

So you see, there are a number of good reasons to put off doing laundry, but I'm not going to fall for any of them. Today is Laundry Day. I must be strong. I must power through - 'cause if I don't, then the underwear that I'm wearing today will become the underwear that I wear tomorrow, and there's something hygenically unpoetic about that particular song and dance.