Friday, November 7, 2014

When Doing Laundry Kicks Your Ass

Ahhh laundry day. I do the laundry every Tuesday and Friday. Sometimes, when I'm feeling especially cheeky, I will do the bedding. Today was one of those days.

Now some of you may remember, I am exactly 1-week in to writing my very first novel. What you may not know, however, is that I've set a personal goal to write double the amount of words the NaNoWriMo initiaitive is all about.

The normal sane still really hard standard number of words you're expected to write to "win" NaNo is 50k. I am shooting for 100k. I read publishers (who are obsessed with word count and not pages - who knew?) typically expect an adult fiction novel to be between 70k - 125k words.

This rocked my world. I thought for sure 50k was the standard and would give me a good book to edit. Nope - not even close. So my goal went up, and my sleep went down. I get up around 4 and write for 2 hours, and then write for another 2 hours at night when the little one goes to bed. I don't go above 2 hours a session because I've found 2 hours is my magic moment where the brain goes "smoosh" and all inspiration goes right out the window.

Carving out an additional 4 hours of writing a day has kinda killed my "do it all" abilities. Even the simplest tasks are stupidly difficult these days.

Like the laundry.


So I ripped all the sheets off the bed this morning, grabbed my blankets and pillowcases, and headed downstairs. I chucked the pile on the floor, realizing as the pile was mid-air that there was a huge, and I mean HUGE cat poop right in the middle of the floor. Fresh, too. Oh yea, it was awesome. Naturally, my grown-woman, purple cuddle blanket landed right on top of the poo. It was actually stuck to it. So gross.

I tossed that load in first. I made the load a bit lighter so the blanket had plenty of room to spread out in there. Yuck. I promise my cat IS supposed to be litter box trained.

About an hour later, I moved the first load to the dryer and tossed the second load in the washer. My blanket look good, thankfully. But then, when I went to remove it from the dryer, I saw it had morphed into a lint-creating psycho blanket. There were fuzz balls on every piece of clothing in there. The lint thing was filled to max capacity - it was overflowing. I took the stupid blanket out and took the clothes upstairs to shake them out and fold them.

Bad idea.

Now, I'm not naturally one to rant and rave about lint - #firstworldproblems and all that. But can I please tell you. This was so insane, so stupidly crazy, I just had to take a picture of it. Who has seventeen pounds of lint fall out of their clothes when they try and fold them? WHO?


No worries. Just a little hiccup. I got this. I moved the second load to the dryer and tossed my third load in. Three loads rockin, two left to go. I waited for the dryer to finish, went down, took out the second load (which had only a little bit of the insano lint on it) and opened the washer to transfer my third load to the dryer.

Hmmm. The clothes still had soap all over em. Hmm. The water is pretty low. Hmm, it smells like garbage in here.

I turned the dial and pulled it up to get the water running again. It started flowing. I set the lid down. It stopped flowing.I opened it. Nothing. Pulled the dials. Nothing. I looked at the sad, sad pile of clothes sitting in there, all wet and soapy. I jammed a canning knife into the door latch, hoping it was that easy. Nothing.

Huh. Time to go all Laura-Ingalls on this shit.


The sheets will need to wait, though. Possibly forever.



My name is Jen and today, laundry absolutely kicked my ass. K.O.

Pretty sure I would give a pioneer chick a run for her money in the washing department, tho.

Hope you all get your chores out of the way so you can have an awesome weekend! As always, thanks for reading :)
Jen