Through the wringer

Here's a picture of me in my laundry room, running a load of dirty clothes through my washing machine with one of those new-fangled automatic wringer attachments. It is some kind of awesome, let me tell you, and I'm sure I'll learn how to get long in life minus the first two fingers of my right hand, although I admit typing is going to be a difficult hurdle: it took me seventeen hours to type this paragraph.

No, really, I'm just kidding. Whaddaya mean, you knew it was a fake picture because you know I'm not that thin? Shut up. Just....shut up.

My great-grandma really did have a washer like this, though. I used to be scared to death of that thing, and what was really sad is that the monstrous washer lived in the same back room as the enormous coffin-shaped deep freeze. And the deep freeze? That's where Grandma kept the popsicles. The washing machine had a vaguely menacing air about it, crouching there on the old-fashioned linoleum, although the deep freeze probably posed a greater threat since in order to get a popsicle out of it, I had to lift the heavy lid and balance on my stomach, propping the lid open with one hand while reaching down into the depths to grab a (red) popsicle with the other. The dangers of pitching head-first into the freezer or the lid falling on my head and rendering me unconscious and perhaps hypothermic never entered my mind.

Which is why I am not as thin as the woman in that picture: greed so often triumphs common sense with me.

Moving forward to today, Kayte gave me a most excellent laundry tip a couple of weeks ago that I thought I'd hand on to all of you: Buy some kind of cheap laundry detergent to wash your sheets and towels and the dogs' bedding and all that kind of thing in, and save the expensive Tide for your clothes.

There! Wasn't that a good tip? I had truly never thought of that and it has saved us some money. It is true that the towels and sheets have a....different texture. And they don't smell as good. But they're clean and the inexpensive brand of detergent I buy at ALDI for about $2.99 a bottle helps offset the cost of the Tide we use to wash clothing in this house with no water softener.