Dec 22 2007
Laundry Day at MAO
It’s scary when you start acting like your parents. Just ask Mugs! Anyway, while Mama was amazingly gifted and creative, she was also extremely forgetful and incredibly disorganized. She could lose a set of car keys faster than anyone else I’ve ever met. Unfortunately, every so often, I display flashes of this talent of forgetfulness.
As I mentioned previously, I’m reworking my routines now that I’ve moved to FOB Marez. Another item in my weekly schedule is laundry. In our compound, we have our own laundry trailer. At the old site, we had 4 washers and dryers. One of the washers was known for leaving rust stains on every article of clothing washed in it. I only learned that bit of trivia after washing a load of my underwear in that machine. When I commented to Curt that all of my underwear got stained in the wash, he said “Oh yeah, you must have used that one machine on the left hand side. It stains everything.” With 3 good washers and 4 dryers, the machines were in constant demand. If you left your load in for too long, it was quickly removed from the machine. In our new site, we have a brand new laundry trailer with 10 new washers and dryers. Currently, supply exceeds demand.
Yesterday afternoon, when I went for my run, I noticed I was using my last clean pair of PT shorts. This reminded me that I needed to do my weekly laundry on Saturday, today. So after lunch today, I shoved my bath towel into the laundry bag with my week’s worth of dirty clothes, pulled the sheets off the bed, and headed next door to the laundry trailer. I found 3 open washers next to each other, one for darks, one for lights, and one for uniforms. I hope Mugs is impressed that I separate! After loading the darks, I realized that the only PT shorts were the ones I wore the previous day.
I searched every inch of my trailer for the other 4 pairs of PT shorts I knew I had. It’s hard to hide much in a 12 ft x 20 ft room. I finally decided that someone had walked into my trailer and helped themselves to my PT shorts. I know, sounds a bit crazy. The only other possibility is that I left them in the laundry room the previous week. But since I had worn PT shorts to run a few other times this week, that really wasn’t possible. I went back to the laundry trailer to check anyway, just in case. No luck. Then for some reason, I opened a dryer and looked inside and found a load of my laundry with 4 pairs of PT shorts in it. Then I remembered that I had washed my laundry just a couple of days ago, because I forgot to last Saturday. I had left the load of darks in the dryer, and because we have more than enough machines right now, no one took them out to use the machine!
Scary, isn’t it?
and yes…geesh i remember the disappearing keys, lol
and …then on top of that ….the clothes
and mama didn’t forget any
she just was up to her eyeballs in clothes…lol
i miss mama too dale.
we love you
we are praying for you and we are forever holding mama in our hearts.
it’s so freeing to have nissa living with me right now
i can talk about mama and love her like i’m supposed to naturally do.
thanks dale for being you
and for my memories today.
My mother was forgetful too. Living in Texas it was always hot, the first thing mom did when she walked in the house was go straight to the freezer to get the bottle of Coke she placed there prior to running the errand or picking us up from school. This was always the last place we looked when looking for the car keys and exactly where we found them…..in the freezer.
I am exceedingly grateful for our new laundry facility. No more wheeling or dealing for a place in line to use a machine that may or may not work. No more waiting for a mission for all 22 security team members to be on the road to ensure a machine would be available. Now if I could just remember where I packed the laundry detergent.
You do much better than me Dale. I grew up with a Mum and 5 sisters, married at 19 and never done a load of washing until i lived alone for 3 months in 2000 on a work transfer to Sydney.
After running completely out of clean clothes, I bit the bullet, went down to the laundry in my motel and put my first ever load of washing into the machine and threw in some powder. When I came back an hour later, dry washing powder was all over the floor and walls, my clothes were warm and had a nice lemon fragrance.
Apparently, what I thought was a front loading washing machine was actually a clothes drier! (My washing skills were only surpassed by my cooking, where the only home cooked meals I had for three months was corns flakes or sultana bran).
Yep, my Mother is so proud …
That’s hilarious, Michael. Hopefully Janeane never lets you operate a home appliance!
Funny you should say that Dale. Janeane asked me yesterday to put a loan of washing on for her while she went shopping, and was bit cranky when she got home and it was not done.
Trouble was, I had done the washing … just the wrong pile of clothes!
Sometimes I think it’s better to just stay right away from the laundry.