The never ending laundry basket

May 16th, 2010 - I hate doing laundry, so when I do it, I am really wanting to have an empty laundry basket when I am finished. I live alone so you would think I would not have much laundry. Well, you would be wrong, because I am a picky sorter and because of that I end up with 9 to 10 small loads, sometimes so small there is only one item in the load.

I learned when I was very young, by my mom, the queen of doing laundry that it is critical to sort your laundry by colors. No, I am not talking the whites, colors, and darks. I am talking my mom's sorting, meaning whites that you bleach and those that you do not. For instance never bleach underwear, always bleach socks, and whether you bleach t-shirts all depends on the fabric. And always check the pile twice. Because putting bleach on anything you did not intend to have bleach on is a diaster. I am sure everyone has ended up with pick clothes when they mistakenly put in a red shirt with the other whites. When this happens, forget it you will never totally remove the pink, not unless you use so much bleach that you will burn through the fabric. Been there, done it. Moving on to the light colors, which includes pinks, yellows, light orange and light blue and nothing else. Then there is the red pile. Reds always go alone, always. If you deviate and put reds with your darks the red will take on the blue from the darks and will never look pure red again. It will look like an old, dingy red shirt, and if by chance you slip a red in the whites...well we covered that above. Now you have your bright colors, that is bright orange, teal blue, lime green, and hot, hot pink. From there we move on to the darks, but never mix jeans with slacks or sweats, however the sweats can go with the jeans, if the jeans are not black, in which case they should be washed inside out and by themselves. And lastly we have the towels. All two of them, but never with the dish towels or dish rags, which will need to be bleached but not with the whites needing bleach, as who wants the dirty food from dishes mixed with their socks or other white bleachables. So let's see that is right around 10 loads. Ahh, finally finished, I will leave drying the clothes for another day, as we all know only SOME items get dried, everything else gets hung, and you know what that means. Everything that gets hung, gets ironed...

And so just when I think I am done. I walk back to my room and notice the one sock I dropped while carrying the laundry to the laundry room...NNNNOOOOOO. My laundry basket will not be empty. So I do the only thing I can think of, that's right, I throw the sock out. In a week or so I will also throw out the one sitting on the dryer that I couldn't find last week. Hmmmm