Make the Best of It...

My Granny had a saying. Whenever things weren't going well, I remember her telling us we'd have to "make the best of it." She was always cheerful about it (although I don't know what she might have been thinking behind that optimistic exterior) and I figured it probably had something to do with having lived through the depression...a long-ago, faraway occasion that as a child I couldn't possibly comprehend.

Three weeks ago I had cause to adopt my grandmother's attitude when, after a difficult evening of burned-out light bulbs and broken Spinbrushes, I dumped a large load of wet clothes into the dryer and attempted to start it. I pushed start like I always do, and the dryer just stared at me after beeping and clicking a bit. No amount of coaxing could get it to tumble, not even a little. It had just successfully dried a load of jeans about 8 hours before. Ugh! I wanted to go to bed early and cry. I hung the wet clothes all over the tiny laundry room, and checked Sears' repair schedule. Conveniently, they could take a look in a week (which usually doesn't guarantee it would be fixed that day). I checked my calendar and knew it would be at least two weeks before I could spend a leisurely day waiting around the house for a repairman.

Desperate, I made the best of it and turned to facebook, hoping someone could recommend a super repair person they had found. What I got was a bunch of guys encouraging me to visit You Tube for repair instructions. So naturally I googled the problem and took apart the machine. Right...it sounds so easy until you're lying on the floor in a puddle of lint. Sadly, it wasn't the two most common problems (a fuse or a belt). But the good news is, I've got a much cleaner lint trap (which yielded 13 cents and a number of stray collar stays). Have you ever seen the interior of your lint trap? It's a little bit scary!

Deep breath. Make the best of it.

Knowing I had to do something about the growing mounds of dirty clothes (we had just returned from a spring break trip, and the family was still rudely changing their clothes daily), and knowing I didn't want to spend even 10 minutes in a Laundromat, I put on my errand hat and traveled to Home Depot for sturdy clothesline (and a few lightbulbs) and then to Target for a bunch of clothespins. Armed with that can-do attitude, I strung that clothesline all around the back porch and out into a tree. Knowing the washing machine still worked, I set about washing clothes and within an hour I had the back porch decorated with a load of men's and boy's underwear. This felt pretty good until I went to bring them in...and found that while they were dry, they were also a bit...how shall I say?...crunchy.

Making the best of it, I had an epiphany: So that's why people use liquid fabric softener.

Which explains why the second load (my underwear) came out softer. You see, I realized pretty quickly that hanging the little dryer sheets on the line wasn't going to help soften anything. So my friend google helped me find a recipe for homemade fabric softener. Did you know you can take all those little bottles of hotel hair conditioner, mix them with white vinegar, and make a perfectly good fabric softener? That's what you do when you're too lazy to go to the store, or when you're making the best of something.

Now that I'm in my 4th week of drying clothes outside, I've learned a few more things -- especially that laundry without a dryer is very weather-dependent.

• There are some days you just can't do the wash. This is both good (day off!) and bad (no way you'll have those jeans for tomorrow).
• It's important to watch not only the precipitation but also the humidity. I've had loads dry in 20 minutes when the wind is blowing and the humidity is zero. But on a humid day, trying to dry clothes is about as smart as fixing my hair.
• And the wind -- it can be such a help -- but you'd better have things clipped onto the line tightly, or that underwear will be flying across the yard!
• There's nothing that will get you to jump out of bed faster than leaving your laundry out overnight to finish drying...and then hearing a huge clap of thunder at 2am.
• On a nice day, hanging the wet stuff on the line is a great reason to spend some alone time outside (people scatter when I say it's time to put out the laundry). And later you get to go back out for more quiet time, to retrieve the dry clothes!
• When you grill with clothes on the line, sometimes you wear a smoky essence.

Turns out, most things dry just as well on the line as they do in the dryer, which I didn't expect. Cotton towels aren't as soft. Some shirts come out unwearable. But that's minor stuff. I've got an appointment for the repairman later this week. We'll see how bad the damage is. But at least we have a workaround -- and temps in the 80's in the forecast. Overall, this is WAY better than when the dishwasher was out for a month. Don't get me started on that!

In other appliance news, the front-loading washer (for which I've been very grateful since the dryer went on vacation) isn't perfect. When I innocently opened the door last week to run a load of clothes, it was like Niagara Falls in the laundry room. I am not kidding when I say water poured/gushed/cascaded out the front of the machine (the seal works great, incidentally, if you keep the door closed) and splashed onto the linoleum, obviously enjoying its sudden freedom. Fortunately, a basket of recently-line-dried towels was nearby and I could mop up pretty quickly. Making the best of it, I can say the floor in there is a bit cleaner now.

I can only imagine how amused my Granny might be if she could see how this appliance failure has affected me. After all, she used her dishwasher for storing pantry items (I can remember going there for dinner and having to hand-wash dishes because the dishwasher was filled with crackers and boxes of Chex). She had a dryer but rarely used it; her square pink bathtub always had clothes dripping into it. All I can figure is, growing up during the depression must make these bulky appliances seem pretty silly.