Since our washer flooded the laundry room floor last weekend, the laundry has been piling up. Max's can come and fix it, and they should come Thursday or Friday. But laundry waits for no repairman.
So off I went in search of a laundromat. I nixed the one by Tom's 14th as being too much in the middle of Festival traffic. Aha, I thought, there's one on Garfield over by ex-Oleson's. Well that one was full of men for some reason - not just any men, but toothless men with long scraggly oily hair and dirty hats - at least seven of them. I didn't want to spend a hour with them - call me picky.
There's a "nice" laundromat by Tom's East Bay. It was not bad at all, unless you count the three screaming children who kept running around the place, and in and out of the door. They would run out, and open their car door and get things to play with. The problem was that I had inadvertently parked next to them, and their door was occasionally hitting my car. I said, "Please don't bump my car" in a very pleasant voice, which is when I found out that they didn't speak English.
I think the last time I was in a laundromat was in 1991 in Sydney Australia. We carried bags of our laundry through The Rocks area and walked a long, scenic way to the laundromat. Those were the days when I was still a walker! That laundromat was owned by an Asian man, and was OK, but not much.
On our trip out west we went to many laundromats, but two are memorable. One was in Coos Bay, Oregon, a fishing community. The whole town smelled like fish. The laundromat was particularly fishy. I was afraid that our clothes would never be the same. In actuality, it was fine, and our clothes did not have aroma-of-the-sea.
The other memorable one was in Yellowstone Village, in the national park. I couldn't believe my eyes! The sign said we could leave the laundry and pick it up tomorrow washed, dried, and folded. Oh what a deal - we were planning on staying in the area for five days or more - I was in paradise! The next day we picked up our clothes in paper sacks, very nicely laundered. It was a vacation inside a vacation!
When we were living in Belleville, I was teaching full time and we had three kids who each insisted on using one towel a day. I was overwhelmed with the laundry. I could handle the teaching, cooking, shopping, taking kids to activities, the dog, the cats, yard work, etc. But I just couldn't keep up with the damn laundry. Then I discovered that the Monarch Laundry in Romulus would do it for me! I would drop off a huge laundry bag full every week, and pick it up the next week. It wasn't perfect - they didn't do much sorting, and the folding was iffy, but it really saved my bacon. We did that for almost three years.
Looking back, I guess that laundry has always been kind of a bugaboo for me. I enjoy it much more in retirement! I still hate laundromats.
The day began with two hours of sitting at the computer trying to satisfy the requirements of Sony/Everquest technical help so that we can run EverQuest when Dylan is here. I've tried everything to get it going, but I keep getting error messages. After the first help letter didn't help, I asked again and the second letter had a list of information that they needed to figure out what the problem was - find some obscure files and then zip them - such a pain! It took me two hours and it'll probably be days before I get a response.
Then I went to get a perm at BoTangles, and to visit Mother. I took her a couple of different types of lotions for itchiness. She seems in fine fettle.
On the way to the laundromat, I stopped at the cemetery to check on our geraniums. They were in bad shape - totally dry. I was generous with watering them and I'm sure they'll revive.
Meanwhile, back at 888, Dick was cleaning out the garage and taking chuddah to the dump, closely followed by mowing the entire yard. So we're in great shape - we feel like we each accomplished a lot today.
