laundry (mis)adventures

For book club last month we read Almost Amish.  Well, some people read it.  I read 40 pages or so until I decided life was too short to waste it on something so boring.  Someone else read a romance by mistake also called Almost Amish.  Anyway, boring or not, it had some good ideas, like drying your clothes on a clothesline in the basement during the winter to conserve energy.  Dryers use more energy than any other household appliance except for the refrigerator.  So I decided to try it.  Drying clothes in the basement I mean, not using more energy than a refrigerator.  Newsflash: dryers were invented for a reason.  Drying clothes on a line in your basement is a lot of work.  After a week of that, I was through.  Sorry, Mother Earth.

But the kids thought it was wonderful, and Claire insisted that we also start washing our clothes the old fashioned way.  I told her no.  We don't have a washboard, and it's hard on your clothes, not to mention your back and your sanity.  But she insisted that we must be good stewards of the earth, so I told her about something I saw on Law & Order once: a family washing their clothes in the bathtub with their feet.  She decided that would suffice.

They were having a little too much fun with the stomping part, so I made sure they helped with the wringing out part.  Even sore arms and fingers from squeezing out water didn't do the trick, so I finally told Claire that without using the washing machine, we wouldn't have time to do things like family history work, which is at least as important as being good stewards of the earth.  She seems okay with that.  Which is good.  I hope to never repeat washing clothes in the bathtub EVER again.  Only one load and I felt like my whole Saturday was down the drain.

Bottom line: don't read non-fiction.  Or if you do, don't tell your kids about what you're reading.  They're too easily radicalized.