The Sting of Laundry

I don't know what those construction guys were thinking when they built our laundry room, but they were not definitely not deep thinkers. We have a three car garage, operating on the theory that if you want one car to park in the garage, you get a double bay and two cars, you get a third bay. That is how real life works. Well, our builder must not add the third bay very often, because the finished product is a testimony of that ignorance. A typical ducting is run through the wall and outside with a minimum of turns to help prevent the lint from clogging. Logical, right? Our ducting runs into the wall, up the wall and outside through a vent on the ROOF of the third car garage! Hello, idiots! So our dryer is very inefficient due to the lame-brained confusing configuration of dumb ducting. True story.

We have purchased all of the necessary parts, hoses, clamps, etc., to reroute the ducting out of the house on the ground level. We have left all of those components in the trunk of the car in the hopes that the repair will complete itself. Not a very good plan, but that is how it works with five kids, a husband in full-time college and my oldest son gone 15+ hours a week for football. Did I mention that I work three nights a week? I was bored and needed a job to keep me busy (yeah, right).

Benjamin has also been wetting the bed every morning for over two weeks to make sure that the laundry room has a constant workload. I have been using the inefficient dryer along with my solar clothes dryer. That is fancy wording for "clothesline." I started using a clothesline when we lived in California during the "Gray outs" when electricity costs were sky high, so I have some experience.

I had a load on the line for two days. It got wet with the sprinklers in the morning, so I left it on. Then it got wet with the evening sprinklers, and left on again. This morning, I took off what was dry and put washed bedding out. I remembered to bring everything in in the afternoon, but didn't get around to folding until after 10:30 p.m. As I was turning an orange shirt right-side-out, my knuckle got an instant stinging feeling and I yanked back my hand. I couldn't think of why my hand would start hurting like that, then I figured it out. My hand got stung three times last year and my back had two stings the year before that. I threw the shirt on the ground and a hornet fell out. Then it saw a blur of tread and was nearly dead. Payback is a #@!$^*! as they say. I put its mostly squashed body outside and walked away from the laundry for a while.

Washing clothes is a love/hate relationship. I love being a good provider for my family, but the constant workload is intense. Having a hornet sting my knuckle while folding clothes at the sacrifice of my sacred sleep is just adding insult to injury, not a good equation. Stupid bug. Tomorrow when I go out to work in the backyard, I think that I will step on it again.