Today, let's talk about laundry. Yeah, you read me right...laundry. But as the lyric implies...we are not going to talk about Dirty Laundry. We're going to talk about clean laundry. The act of doing laundry. Why, you ask, has this girl gone crazy?? Why in the world would she want to talk about laundry? I'll tell you why. It's because laundry is a sore point in my life. Laundry has been the cause of many fights and disagreements between The Hubble and myself.
Here we have Exhibit A:
Please meet Bill and Peggy. Bill is my dryer (pictured on the left) and Peggy is my washer (pictured on the right). We purchased this beautiful washer/dryer set a little over a year ago, right before The Hubble deployed to Afghanistan. I fell completely in love with this pair. But upon learning of the somewhat hefty price tag these two boasted, The Hubble was not impressed. We fought for days over my need to have a "luxury" washer/dryer set and his need to have "only the necessities." I am not exaggerating when I say that this couple, my Peggy and my Bill, almost brought The Hubble and I to divorce. Seriously. But guess who won? ;-)
Now, everything was going fine in our lives. Peggy, Bill and I had a great relationship together. We leaned on each other quite a lot in the last year together. We've learned to coexist. Fortunately, Peggy and Bill were no longer an "issue" for The Hubble since he was in Afghanistan and wasn't thinking about them. Then silly me brought them up in an email and The Hubble got a little heated again. Oops. Learned my lesson.
Well, now The Hubble is home and he's learning to love Peggy and Bill. He asked me to show him how to use them the right way. I think he is finally okay with them being a permanent part of our lives. Okay. No problem now right? Wrong.
See...the other day The Hubble and I were folding laundry together (please excuse my very bare walls. we just bought new bedroom furniture and bedding and need to figure out how we are going to decorate the room)...
Now I know what some of you girls are probably thinking...hello! He does laundry! What's the problem?!?!?!
The problem is the method! We have completely different methods when it comes to folding laundry and when trying to do about 5,000 loads together, things started to get a little...interesting.
Let me explain the methods to you. Enter in Exhibit B:
The Wiffle's method: To take items from the "community pile," fold them and separate them into piles according to what goes where. If I'm standing by a drawer and something belongs in said drawer, I will turn around and put it away right then. I know we only have a few kitchen towels so whenever I ran across a towel I would fold it and walk around the corner to put it away. After everything is folded and laid out (hanger items) I will then take each neatly folded or laid out pile and put them away in their designated home. Capeesh? Okay. I'm glad you are still with me.
Now, enter in Exhibit C:
The Hubble's method: he likes to separate things into piles (just as I do) but he doesn't fold them right away. He throws things haphazardly into different piles according to person and room in which they belong.
I will also take a moment now to tell you that as he's throwing his messy items onto my neatly folded piles and I'm having to try to keep everything straight while he's ripping through the laundry like a madman!
After he separates everything out according to room, he goes back and lays everything out neatly, then he folds it all, then he puts it away.
Here are the arguments:
The Wiffle: I believe he is doing double, sometimes triple the work because he's touching everything at least twice. He throws everything into piles (touching once), goes back and folds everything (second time in hand), then once everything is folded he puts it away; three times in the hand. And that doesn't count when he lays out the t-shirts before folding them.
The Hubble: He believes I am not using my time and energy efficiently and that I'm unnecessarily expending said time and energy. When I turn around and put something in a drawer each time I run across drawer contents, I'm wasting time. By taking kitchen towels around the corner and putting them away one, sometimes two, at a time, I'm wasting energy. Whereas he stands in one place the whole time.
So who is right? Would you care to weigh in here? Do you have an alternate method that may quell this predicament? Maybe we shouldn't do laundry together?
Well there you have it. Thanks for talking about all this laundry with me. At least it was clean!
