neo-modern solutions to ancient and annoying domestic predicaments

Well, I've done it. I've gone and got my mother wondering if I'm a changeling and who actually raised me and in what century.

Is she sacrificing goats at Beltaine? you ask. Is she raising chickens? Going the route of polygamy? Joining a holy order? Donning full body armor and running off to fight the Huns?

Sadly, none of those. It's much worse, actually.

I've sent out my laundry.

Yes: reel, gasp, clutch at the edges of your desks, ladies and gentleman, beg me not to do it, plead all you like, it's too late. I've gone and done it and I'm glad, I tell you, glad!

The situation is this: I live a busy and exhausting life. I work a demanding, high-stress job (which I am beginning truly to love) and when the day is over, I am pretty much too tired even to cook myself a meal. In fact, I have been buying frozen chicken pot pies and making myself sandwiches for dinner for the past fourteen or so days: Lo and behold, single and three weeks from twenty-five, I have morphed into a modern woman.

The laundry dilemma is grim. I have no washer & dryer readily available in the building where I live, which means that when the clothing is screaming for cleaning, I must pack it all into baskets and bags and load it in the car and haul it to a laundromat, which is either terrifying and dangerous and reeking of cigarette smoke, or sterile and boring and very far away. I must then sit around wasting two hours of my time and trying to stay awake in a dingy atmosphere, which is particularly unappealing on a weeknight, but then weekends are insanely busy at the laundromat and you wind up feeling like one cow among many milling around and mooing dismally while waiting for a machine to open up. Or maybe like a runty shark in a feeding frenzy, racing to a washer to slam dunk your sheet set inside before the bearded bespectacled man or the mother of ten beats you to it.

The more I have to do it, the more I truly hate it. I begrudge every lost second which I could be spending buying some precious relaxation time in the evenings instead of getting cramps in my shoulder blades from folding and pains in my back from hauling it around, then staggering back into my apartment so bone-weary I can't even put it away before collapsing like a card table among the rumpled unmade ruins of my bed.

Had I a washing machine at my immediate disposal, it would be different. I could spend Saturdays puttering with the laundry and using it to break up other chores. I could spend five minutes here and ten minutes there folding and ironing in pleasant little chunks. I could put it away a little bit at a time. I could sing while doing it and not seem like a crazy person while all the world watches.

But I don't, and my cheap and indolent landlord refuses to put one in the basement for me (he says there's no hook-up, but I believe one could be made; he just doesn't want to). And as I was commiserating with MP last night, she reminded me that back in the day, people always sent out their laundry, if they had any means to do it; it wasn't until the wide accessibility of washing machines & dryers in the home that people began to do their own.

So I decided to bring shame on the head of the woman who reared me to do all my own chores and make my frantic, stressful life a little more burden-free. There's a laundromat 1.5 minutes away from my place of employment which does drop-off and pick-up. They wash, dry, fold and hang for just 80 cents a pound. My laundry will only cost me twenty dollars this week -- just slightly more than what I would pay to do it myself, and it will save me monumental amounts of time and mental stress (since I have to spend the entirety of each designated Laundry Day gearing myself up to do it). I can drop it off in the morning and pick it up when I get off work.

Lovely. (Now if I can just remember to pick up a chicken pot pie on my way home from work.)