domesticated (ish)

Friday, January 18, 2008




so, I often have conversations something like this with my friends:

friend:
so, wanna get together tonight?

me: um, I really have to do laundry. Not sure I should hang out.

friend: how often do you do laundry? Didn't you just do laundry last week?

me: well, I had planned to, but ended up, um, well, just not doing it.

friend: something else came up?

me:
um, yeah, I got kidnapped. By a good book and my couch.

And on it goes. I start planning to do laundry about 2 weeks before I actually do laundry. Then I finally get desparate, and it's either do laundry or go shopping. Sometimes I go shopping.

I know some of you will think I'm nuts (especially you moms out there who do laundry ALL. DAY. EVERY. DAY. but I can go a whole month without doing a lick of laundry! I planned it that way in college, and until I've got to do laundry for more than just myself, I'm sticking to my guns. At the laundromat, I can throw in six loads of laundry and be done in 2 or 3 hours. If I had a machine at home (in my scary, scary basement), it would take me days. And I would forget halfway through that I was even doing laundry, and my clothes would get all musty or wrinkled and I'd have to wash them twice. Where's the sense in that?

So, for all my friends with whom I've had the above laundry conversation, I thought I'd post some photos proving that I was, indeed, at the laundromat last night. I guess I could have just walked in off the street and taken pics of someone else's laundry, but I'm not that weird. Really.

The stack is mostly my cheap-o fabric that I got to practice sewing on. When it's only a buck a yard (as a good friend informed me), you really can't go wrong for practice fabric. Since I think I'm going to need a lot of practice to really come up with something usable/giftable/wearable.

side note: I once had a guy walk completely out of his way when exiting the laundromat to tell me "I dig your sneakers" and then walk quickly away. It's still one of my favorite compliments.

In the interest of complete and total honesty (of which I'm a big fan), I must say that these were not the sneakers. It was a pair of blue cons. These are fake cons from Ukraine, which set me back all of about three bucks.

5 comments:

M. said...

I'm quite familiar with that musty, I-left-the-laundry-in-the-washer-all-night smell... :)

jen said...

you? c'mon!

'course, the laundromat has its drawbacks as well. More than once I've realized several hours after I left there that I forgot an entire load of laundry in a dryer! And here I thought everything fit so much better b/c it was folded!

Dave said...

Wow, I must confess I am impressed with your talent once again!

You have the best eye for picture taking of anyone I know...or close to it anyway.

Not only that, check out those folds in that laundry! Nice job....and you can tie your shoe too! What talent!

jen said...

thanks, dave. the shoe-tying took years of concentrated study. As did the laundry folds. Some people come by these things naturally, but I've really had to invest some effort. ;)

fortunately, there are tutorials out there for these things:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVyjSyBn_UE

Shannon said...

Jen, I had wanted to comment on this post for a long time, but had had trouble with my acct. password.

So just to tell you, I think this is one of your funniest posts. That dialog just cracks me up.

And I spent nearly five years doing once-a-month laundry (now we finally have a w/d). It worked pretty well except that Jake always got grumpy on once-a-month laundry night and could never remember just how much fun it was to do hours of laundry together. I always had to remind him.

And uh, we had conversations with friends similar to yours: "you can't come over because you have to do laundry? can't you just do it another night? weren't you just doing it last week?" (guilty looks at each other because we ended up not getting it done. Jake won the day, but now there were no clothes...)