Washday

Sunday seems to have become the new Thursday for me. I used to write on Thursday night but found nothing happening two Sundays ago so I wrote then planning on making that a habit. The following Sunday though, Benjamin and family came over and we played a rousing game of Boggle. I would much rather have family over to enjoy whatever we do than write this blog. Besides, even though I lost (Dan won) , it was great to see Pete get his comeuppance by losing to his little brother.

Melissa and kids came over tonight but we menfolk were at our stake general priesthood meeting so we missed them and I now have time (and quiet) to continue my (almost) weekly waste of cyberspace.

Lesley commented on my last bog that I predate Zip-lock bags. Well kiddo, I predate a whole bunch of things not the least of which is permanent-press which brings me to my topic of washday.

When our kids were young and multitudenous every day but Sunday was washday. A daily (except for Sunday) rotating chore for one of them was to fold two baskets of laundry. An eon-and-a-half ago when I was a lad washday happened about every two weeks or whenever I wanted to play ball with my buddies. It was always on Saturday when I was home from school except in the summertime when it could strike at random, unannounced, killing what would have been a fine and pleasant summer day.

We had a washing machine that was state-of the-art with TWO agitators and a wringer that could swing between them and also run in reverse. It was HUGE. You don't know what a wringer is do you?

This was way before the spin cycle was invented so to wring the water out of the clothes, you put them through two horizontal rubberized cylinders that would squeeze the water out. Then they would go into the first tub of rinse water, through the wringer, into a second tub of rinse water, back through the wringer, and into a basket to be taken to the back yard and hung on the clotheslines. Unless they were white clothes or sheets. They went into yet another tub of bluing so they would look even whiter then, you guessed it, back through the wringer. It was quite effective. Tedious, time consuming and a ton of work, but effective.

My sister Bonnie wrote a poem about washday extolling the virtues of the wonderful clean smell of the sheets and clothes as Mom would take them off the line and pile them them up in our arms. All I knew was I was missing out on playing with my friends.

The washing and drying was really only half of the chore. All but the sheets, towels, and my whitie-tighties had to be ironed. What I thought was ironic (wink, wink) at the time was Mom taking clothes that were now quite dry and sprinkling them with water so they could be ironed later. We had a dryer (or wrinkler as my Dad called it) but it was only used in inclement weather.

You've come a long way baby!

More of Frightened Ma

I can't really blame this on my sweet mother because the time I spent as a zygote and ever-expanding young fetus took place from about mid-year 1948 to March of 1949, long before the invention of Zip-Lock bags. Plastic was a newfangled thing back then and not to be trifled with.

You couldn't even buy unused plastic bags then unless you had a bread factory or some other type of factory that made stuff to put into plastic bags. Ok, maybe that would be called a bakery but whatever, you get my point. I remember that Wonder Bread not only would build strong bodies 8 ways (whatever THAT meant), but it came in a plastic bag with multicolored balloons on it (on the bag not the bread).

Mom was way ahead of her time because she would save the bags and use them for her own bread or whatever else she might think of to put in them. My primary use for them was to wrap one around the end of a stick, light it on fire, then drip the flaming plastic onto ants, scorpions or anything else that got in the way. My bare foot did that once and taught me to wear shoes during the process.

Bottom line: plastic bags are good. At least they were until some idiot thought twist-ties weren't modern enough and came up with those stupid plastic tab thingies. Ugh! Just let well enough alone wouldja? I hate those things too. Twist ties are so much easier to deal with, which brings me back to my real subject: Zip-Lock bags.

I despise them. They are odious to the absolute max! I never know if I have sealed the dumb things or not. No matter how hard they try to make it easy for me to tell. Changing colors, making a little zipping sound, a brass band marching through the kitchen playing "Ta-Da!." I still don't know until air starts oozing out and I have to start all over.

Now Babs has paid good money for some that have TWO lines of zipitude! As if I didn't have enough trouble with just one. And the dopey things are made of plastic so thick you could use it for a tarp! A very small tarp, but a tarp none the less. What am I supposed to put in there? Cactus? Used razor blades? Broken glass? Unexploded ordnance? I just want to have a handful of goldfish with my brown bag lunch for Pete's sake.

Don't even get me started on opening them.