Laundry Skillz

I do all of the laundry in our house. Erin bathes, feeds, and provides Grant with the skills necessary for him to become an acceptable, even productive, member of society. I do the laundry.

In this capacity in our household, I have learned to deal with several, shall we say in such a way as to not sleep on the couch this evening, quirks peculiar to Erin in this regard.

First, all of Erin's clothes are black. All of them. She has blue jeans, but they're dark. She has a stray pink or yellow T-shirt, but they're badly worn at this point in an effort, no doubt, to ensure that they are soon replaced by similar black options. At times, I feel like I'm doing laundry for Morticia Addams or Johnny Cash. If Erin removes her shoes and walks across our family room floor, it ends up covered in little black pills from her black socks. Our carpet ends up looking like raisin toast. I have encouraged her to vary up her color selections, but as a male engineer, my words carry little weight.

Second, Erin never unbuttons anything at the end of the day. She really is ridiculously flexible (which irritates me no end because I can't get off the commode without pulling a muscle). When she comes home from work and decides to change into her home garb, she goes through a series of gesticulations and convolutions, waving her arms and legs about in what looks to the rest of us like some sort of Houdini escape act, until all of her clothes are in a heap at her feet -- not a single button or zipper dislodged. It's truly an amazing feat. Perhaps someone in our family can ask her to give a demo after Christmas dinner.

Third (and most astounding to me) is that after my dear, sweet wife removes her, uh, underpants (as we say in the holler), they end up looking like a silk or cotton baton. I don't get this at all. At the bottom of every hamper is a little pile of what looks like baby blue or light pink fruit rollups. They don't even look like underwear anymore. They're just a little wad of completely rolled up fabric. I have to pin one end of them down and spend ten minutes unrolling them like a Biblical scroll before I throw them in the wash. I've tried to make my underwear do the same thing, but I cannot. I've pulled them off real fast. Nada. I've pulled them off slowly. Nothing. I go to the gym, sweat for an hour (or perhaps 12 minutes) then yank them off as I hit the shower. No go. I have no idea how she makes her shorts do this, and I guess I'll never know. (Especially since I have a strange feeling that after this blog, I may never see her underwear ever again.)