Last night David and I stayed up late watching a movie and Jimmy Kimmel's monologue. (Quit halfway through because it was a rerun.)
And then David put the clean sheets on our bed as I walked through the house cleaning up the bits and pieces of our evening and putting another couple of pieces in the puzzle we are working on.
As I passed the laundry room I sighed.
Last week my washing machine died. And could not be resurrected.
The repairman said to go shopping. I did so grudgingly. Partly because my budget doesn't have room for a new washer and dryer and partly because I found out that in an effort to make washing machines more energy efficient, the government instituted new standards (none of which included anything about making clothes cleaner which seems like a gaping hole in standard-making if you ask me [which nobody did by the way]) which only resulted in making the machines more expensive and less effective.
(Whew. That might have been a run-on sentence just now. Too bad. I've done enough repenting already today.)
Now don't get me wrong.
I like the earth.
But why are saving the earth and having clean clothes mutually exclusive?
And (dang it) the machines I can afford don't match my laundry room like my old one used to and they also stick out way past my countertop and since my laundry room is really just a hallway anyway, it is really bothersome to have them sitting out so far.
The guy who came to install them could tell I wasn't happy.
He said, "I can tell you're thinking something. Do you have any questions?"
"Only the unanswerable kind."
"Try me."
Bless him. I smiled. "What do you know about entropy?"
He cocked his head.
I continued. "I mean I just want to be able to wash my clothes, you know? And in the meantime entropy is slowly destroying my washing machine bit by bit with every load, and at the same time the government thinks they know better than me and they are secretly conspiring to make me buy a machine that is more expensive and less effective than my current machine, which was slowly falling apart by the way. And both of these things were happening simultaneously, until we reached this moment, when I have to buy a new machine that requires special laundry detergent and it takes twice as long to wash and doesn't match and costs a lot of money that I had planned on spending at the beach this summer."
He looked a little nervous at that point, and in his defense, I may or may not have gotten a little teary by the end of it as well.
Clearly at a loss he asked, "How many kids do you have?"
I told him, belligerently.
"Yeah. That's a lot of laundry."
Starting to feel a little soothed, and slightly chagrined, I whined quietly, "And they stick out."
He could tell he was starting to make some headway and perked up. "I think this is a great room. Yeah, they're a little bigger, but there is still plenty of room to walk and you have a great little laundry room here."
"Okay." I felt a little better.
But by the time David left for work I was fired up again.
He asked for clarification. "So are you mad at me?"
"No, I'm just mad."
I gave him the same rant I gave the delivery guy.
A little too buoyantly, he said, "Yeah, but they're more energy efficient."
Which was clearly the wrong thing to say. (Let's be clear. There wasn't a right thing to say at this point. Just walk away, darling. Which is what he did.)
By the time he came home from work, I had repented. I had remembered the millions of women washing their laundry in a dirty river, or over a washboard, or with nothing to wash at all. And I got a little humble.
And as the day wore on and I folded load after load, I got a little more.
And I remembered that I am not entitled to life without entropy. I live in a fallen world. And I could save myself (and my husband, yes please) all kinds of grief by simply accepting this one principle of the plan.
I spend entirely too much energy fighting the fall. And I do mean fighting. Not to mention the exertion of repentance afterwards.
Perhaps I should start implementing my own energy efficiency standards.
Don't worry. I can already hear RIM and CIM. It'll never make it out of committee.