Tag: laundry

Back in Business

The bed’s box spring was delivered this evening by one very smart, strong, handy, and gorgeous delivery boy. Did I say boy? I meant man, man of my dreams. Anywho, the bed feels fabulously better tonight compared to last night. No injuries or discomforts with it tonight. I won’t have to struggle leaning so far over to fold laundry ever again – that sucked today, for sure. And I can breathe more easily being higher off the ground. Yippee! Thank you, Man, for being my special delivery boy. And thank you, God, for such a blessing as he and this super comfy bed!! Amen!

Post-a-day 2022

Actually, inefficiency killed the cat

I just don’t do inefficiency. Period.

Perhaps it is my German blood that flows within me, but I automatically look for the best, most efficient way to do just about anything, whether I’m the one doing it or not, and whether I want to do the evaluation or not. Actually, I’ll often purposely turn my attention away from something that I am not doing, because I know that I, within seconds, will be spending brainpower on developing significant improvements on the effectiveness and efficiency of that noticed activity (e.g. ignoring the guys grinding and paving the streets this past week-ish on the street where I live).

Tonight, I got a little too frustrated for comfort with utter inefficiency. I can accept that other people will be inefficient. However, please, do not waste my time and effort with your inefficiency, people. Please. I just can’t stand it – my brain will not tolerate it for long, as logic defeats your inefficiency every time.

***I reference the second person here as a general idea, not as you, the reader, so, please, accept that I am not accusing you, the reader, of inefficiency. If you are inefficient, however, I invite you to reconsider those ways for more efficient ones. 😉 ***

For me personally, I’m not sure that I do anything in a way that I deem as inefficient. If I have to get up to do something a more efficient way than I would be doing it lying on the floor, either I will get up and do it and then lie back down, or I will rest (if it doesn’t have to be done right now) as I am, and then get up later and do the task when I am ready. I will not do a lazy version of it from my spot on the floor. I just won’t do it.

Now, let’s be real here: I am totally lazy. I do not deny it. That’s a huge part of my efficiency, really. I do not want to waste effort. Ever. And so, I aim to be as efficient as possible, and with everything that I do, so that no effort is wasted. We only have so much energy and effort and time in a day; let us not waste any of it.

So, yeah…, I was extremely frustrated tonight. I wonder what there is for me to improve within myself on this – managing how strongly it effects me, most likely – so I shall consider that specifically and intentionally over the next day or few, and see what comes up.

Post-a-day 2020

Sleepy but tidy

I folded and put away some laundry, and tidied up some other little things today. My room already feels immensely different…, better. I still have lots more to do for things that already have homes or semi-homes, as well as more to do for establishing effective homes for others. And I am okay with that. I am glad and grateful and proud that I have tidied today despite having been exhausted and having desired to lie in bed all day, watching movies. (… which, by the way, I did not do.)

So, yeah, tidying makes a world of a difference. I am looking happily and gratefully forward to the world that awaits me with tidying all that I have here… avec impatience. 😉

Post-a-day 2020

Bed time

A pile of laundry sits on my bed. I sit on my bed. I am exhausted. And yet I am putting photos from the camera onto my computer… both of which are also on the bed.

The photos are great, and I am delighted with their outcomes from the party Saturday.

The laundry turned out great, too, smelling lovely and clean and fresh. But I don’t see myself folding it tonight… I see myself doing my stretches and reading quickly and going to bed.

Now.

Post-a-day 2020

Today’s list

I had several things on my list for ‘want to accomplish’ today.

The first half happened beautifully.

The second half were avoided beautifully.

Instead of doing laundry and folding clothes, I rearranged a bit of furniture how I had been contemplating doing for a while now, and then I cleaned up piles of papers and such that I had had around the floor in my room.

And I organized all my paperwork and labeled it to bring to my CPA.*

It was a huge positive move, but definitely not on the list for today. 😛

I also, instead of working on the photos – I moved them to tomorrow, when I’ll be somewhere with Internet already, using my computer, and can stay a while – today, I expanded immensely the efforts I had intended to make with my Italian studies.

Until just a few minutes ago, I was working on the Italian, which was possibly the fourth time today… I even did detail work on it… and that’s saying something.

I also, instead of hopping to it on those aforementioned tasks, I got myself out of the house, down to our main park in town, and I walked.

For hours.

I even ran into a friend, and I joined her and her friend (and the friend’s daughter) for another hour plus, which started right about when I had been considering heading home.

(Suffice it to say that I walked a lot today, and it was great.)

(And I rode the park train twice… and that was lovely(!).)

All in all, I had a great day.

I even listened to a couple hours of my audiobook while cooking/eating and then walking at the park.

So much accomplished today… it feels good going to bed now, exhausted from a reason other than illness.

Not typically my style, but I would like for it to become my style.

Last week was a good start, and this week was even better… let’s keep this Sunday outdoor social activity + self-improvement stuff up, Banana. 😉

*Not that I’m bourgeais (bourgey?) or anything – I hardly have money to survive in this society at the moment; I just used to work for her, and so we have a sort of arrangement for my taxes to be handled.

Post-a-day 2020

Laundry day

Okay, what is my actual deal with doing laundry?

When I lived at my mom’s last year, and had access to the high efficiency units that did wash and dry with a combined total of about an hour, it was no big deal – I did my laundry just about every time I had enough worn clothing for a single load.

I actually really enjoyed it.

Now – as well as just about every year prior to having the HE units last year – I can’t seem to get myself to do laundry until I’m actually about to run out of clothing… or, rather, have run out of something vital.

In high school, my best friend and I would have “swimsuit day” every so often, for which we would wear swimsuits underneath our school uniforms.

She participated, because she actually found her swimsuit top to be as comfortable as, if not more comfortable than, her regular bras.

I participated – and established – because I was out of clean bras and underwear, and so a swimsuit was my only option for undergarments.

Therefore, every couple weeks or so, we’d have a “swimsuit day”, which I could tell her about the night before, while I still didn’t necessarily out on a load of laundry (though I usually put on laundry the night I ended up pulling out a swimsuit for the next morning).

Fast forward to now: as it stands, this will be my third or fourth night of using a dress and t-shirt to dry myself after my nighttime shower…, because both sets of my towels have been used and placed in the dirty laundry pile/s.

I’m thinking it has to do, in part, with the fact that the HE washers are so much safer on the clothes, especially in terms of color transferring… when there’s a high risk of color bleed, there’s a low chance of my carefully organizing out everything to be wash-ready any time soon.

Also, it just takes so much longer with regular washers and dryers – close to an hour for each.

Seeing as how we live in Houston, I definitely don’t want to put on a load to wash, and then leave for more than an hour… and I am definitely not reliable to turn back up in an hour, if I’ve left home – I just get too distracted with other exciting things that are all out there, in the world, not in my house, you know?

And so, instead, I have laundry pile up and pile up… and I’ve been quite tempted (and even have done it with a suitcase from a trip recently) to pack it all up and bring it to my mom’s house – I never did that in college, so maybe now it’s time, at last. 😛

Also, one bit of defense for me: My current washer and dryer are reached only by going outside on the porch first, and so 1)I want to be safe and not go do that late at night (when I actually am at home and have time to do laundry), and 2)I didn’t have a key that could lock that door properly for the first month+ of living here, and it just seemed a terrible idea to leave the room unlocked, so I just didn’t do laundry for the first several weeks of living here.

Now, however, I have a key that works(!), so I can do laundry here.

The question is: Will I actually do it?

Post-a-day 2019

Cleaning out my brush

Sometimes, it really is the small, mundane things that gives us the most value in life, should we choose to do them with intention and focus…

Washing a pile of dishes…, folding the laundry…, cleaning out the towel fuzz that has ended up in my brush…, making the bed with fresh sheets…

These are the places where a mindful, intentional, meditative action becomes infinitely more than just a simple task of keeping house, but puts us in touch with the universe, the Divine, that dwells somewhere within.

Post-a-day 2018

Tying up dirty boys with grammar

Changing laundry from the washing machine to the dryer (It’s a machine, I know!!!!!!!*), I saw a towel on the floor between the two machines.  It was originally intended for the load of red shades earlier today, but the load was too large for comfort, so I pulled out the towel.  I left it on the floor, because a towel load needed to be done today or tomorrow anyway, so why bother bringing it back upstairs just to bring it back down only hours later?  But that isn’t the point.

The point is (sort of) that I saw the towel sitting there, and I had an almost-urge to pick it up and put it in the dryer with the laundry I was transferring.  Not that I wanted to put it in with the clean laundry, but that, usually, whenever something is on the floor there, it is because it has fallen in the transfer between the two machines.  So, I simultaneously wanted not to touch the towel, to put it in the dryer, and to move it to the dirty towels upstairs (since I wasn’t doing the final two loads tonight, but doing them tomorrow).  And, for a good moment, I was worried that I would pursue the final of the three, and accidentally fulfill the second in my tiredness and in the middle of routine muscle movements, and then wish for the first.

I managed to let go of having to deal with the towel now, and I left it on the floor, for fear of the second result.

As I thought about that possible second result, I was practically distraught at how it would ruin the fact that I had already put the load of clothes on to wash.  By putting one single towel in the dryer, I thought, an entire load of laundry would be considered dirty.  Now, why doesn’t that work the other way around?  Why does one piece of clean laundry not make a load of dirty laundry clean, when mixed together?  The dirty still win out.  And how come a whole load of clean laundry can’t overpower the one dirty article?  The clean just can’t overcome.

And then – now, this is the point of this all – I wondered about what is life is like this, if anything.  Almost immediately, I thought about gender pronouns (and particularly in Spanish and French, because I learned those first).  It’s just like guys and girls.  A group full of guys, the dirty clothes, is (let’s use French) ils.  Add one girl, the clean clothing, and it stays ils.  A group full of girls is elles.  Add one boy, and it becomes ils.

So, no matter what, if there are any boys, it is ils, dirty.  The only way to keep it elles is to have only girls – no boys allowed.

And how odd that the boys are the dirty laundry and the girls are the clean… so like life, and I hadn’t even intended it to be so.**

Anyway, isn’t all of that fun?!  Towels to grammar to life comparisons – I do lead an extraordinarily interesting life, huh?  😛

 

 

*Japan doesn’t exactly do dryers.  People are expected to hang clothes outside, because every has a stay-at-home wife, you see… not.  Everyone used to have a stay-at-home wife, but the lifestyle hasn’t changed.  It just takes days and days to do laundry as a solo-liver, because weather can decide to soak your clean clothes while you’re off at work, or hide the sun from them, or be too humid for them to dry at all until they start to smell of mildew…  I just hung mine all indoors, because I’d heard too many stories from my brother’s issues.  Plus, supposedly people steal women’s underwear from the drying clothes in Japan.  I didn’t need to deal with any of that nonsense.  So, I set my air conditioner to a daytime setting to keep the apartment mildew-free, which also helped dry my clothes!

** I once wrote a poem about how boys are dirty.  I didn’t exactly believe any of it, but I knew that people thought boys were dirty and smelly, and I rolled with the idea.

Post-a-day 2017