From Drudgery To Luxury

The luxury of line dried sheets. Especially if they are my favorite monster design sheets from Garnet Hill.

Back in the day, Brain, growing up, my family did not own a clothes dryer (we also did not have a dishwasher or a color TV, and my parents made us drink powdered milk and eat food that came out of white boxes with big black letters that said only the name of the item inside, like "Macaroni" or "Tuna," but that's material for some other rant). Not having a clothes dryer made a lot of sense since we lived in Tucson where the average daily temperature is like, 85 degrees, and in summer it's still 110 degrees at eleven o'clock at night. There are very few days when you cant get your clothes dried outside in five mins. (if B. were reading this he would no doubt be saying something like, the only drawback to hanging your clothes outside to dry in the Arizona heat is the inevitable loss of some of them to spontaneous combustion - B. has an inflated idea about the actual temperature extremes of the desert southwest and is certain that things there must constantly be bursting into flame).

Anyway, at the time I was embarrassed by our lack of modern technology, and annoyed by the necessity of hauling baskets of laundry out to the line in the back yard. Even the fact that my high school classmates admired me for two things, my drawing ability and the perfect faded color of my Levis 501's, did not make our dryer-less state any more bearable. I swore that when I got out of the house the first thing I would get was a clothes dryer.

So flash forward many years and I FINALLY have a house of my own complete with laundry machines, a washer AND a dryer, and what do I do? I put up a clothes line in the back yard and every chance I get I take the wash out and dry it on the line. I bemoan the fact that there is not enough room for a second clothes line and there is not time for me to hang EVERY load outside. Why? Why this change of attitude? Because there is nothing sweeter than sliding into cotton sheets that have dried outside in the sun, and there really is no other way to get your jeans to shade to that perfect shade of washed out blue, and sure, towels dried on the line are abit stiff and crackly but they exfoliate so well that way don't they?

What was drudgery has become a luxury I rarely have time for but that I savor whenever I get the chance. Go figure.

Now on to a note about APHIDS!


I totally stole this image, shooting it with my Droid
in a bookstore. I didn't even buy the book. I'm
ashamed of that so here's my message, "Kid's don't be
like your evil Aunt Morgan, you wouldn't illegally
download a movie would you?" Sorry Gary Larson Estate.

I haven't done much with it this past week owing to the fact that I have been laid out by the plague or tuberculosis or whatever this thing is that I've got that is making me feel so rotten, but I did totter out there today to check on the peppers. I was worried about them because last time i was out there I noticed that they were being attacked by aphids and I was too sickly to do anything about it at the time. So today I got out there and "what ho?!" Who should I find, but my friendly, neighborhood lady bug larva already on the job and not an aphid in sight. I love when nature's plan comes together!


My hero, the ladybug larva.



B.'s clever idea.

B. has been winning lots of "Great Husband Points" lately, what with his uncomplainingly fetching juice and grapefruit and prescriptions and things during my time wracked with plague, but ALSO because he's gotten quite creative about completing the projects I propose to him. Maybe its just that I've worn him down and he's discovered that the quickest way to having me leave him in peace is just to build whatever it is I have in mind, never mind how it will look or actually function (a practice that formerly drove him MAD). In any case, I was desperate to have a coat rack in our house. Unfortunately, due to a serious lack of space and funds, we were having a terrible time trying to work one in. I dragged home most of a dead cedar tree that I found on one of my walks and insisted that we use IT to make a free coat rack, but that still left the lack of space problem. B. was the one who circumvented that by sawing off the useless bits of the tree and attaching what was left (the functional bit) to the post that inexplicably sprouts out of the floor in our entry way. I LOVE it, it's useful and unique and FREE. And brought to me by the creative effort of my very own B. Quadruple whammy!