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Tradition! Here in our little village of
Anatevka, weaaaaaaahhhhh peepperrrrr
spraaaaayy!

It is now the third day after Thanksgiving, and after hunkering down in our homemade bunker with 12 gallons of water and a shotgun during Black Friday, it's now time to come out and update the blog.  In truth, Dad and I actually ventured out mid-morning on Black Friday, but it was to get a few tools at places like the local hardware store and Sears, not to rush the gates at Best Buy and Target.  The hardware store and Sears were definitely busier than usual, but old fat guys looking at tools lends itself to more of a "milling" pace than a "rabid" pace.  And they keep their guns in the beds of their pickups trucks rather than bringing them into the store.

Black Friday shopping is not a tradition that our family has ever engaged in.  For me, it's rather unsettling to read about the latest religious-induced trampling at a temple or mosque in India or the Middle East, and then realize we have the same thing here....but for game consoles.  However, our family does participate in other standard Thanksgiving traditions, like consuming turkey, and napping, and being thankful for turkey and napping.  We also watch some football, that most celebrated of American sports, although sitting around watching TV compels us to get outside and exercise or do yard work for part of the day as well.  Because if there's a feeling that reverberates in our souls just as strongly as thankfulness, it's guilt.  Ha!

Now that the holiday is over, Nate and I are back in Columbus, and I'm preparing for the workweek ahead.  This means getting a few items from the store, doing a preemptive email check, and having a good cry in my room.  It also means that today I have to do some laundry.  Leading up to the holiday it's easy to let the laundry pile up, knowing that there will be a few blessed days during which you can wear the same t-shirt and sweatpants from dawn to dusk each day and not be accountable to anyone but your family members, who just happen to also be wearing the same t-shirts and sweatpants they wore yesterday.  But as the prospect of returning to work looms, the laundry must be tended to at last.

Maybe you should ask for a team manager for
Christmas.  That's who always did my laundry.

If there is one thing that I hate doing, it is laundering clothes.  For me, laundry is like the Barry Sanders of household chores in that it is the last thing I want to try tackling.  And much like Barry Sanders, I would view the "value" of laundry as being equivalent to a whole host of bench-warmer chores put together.  Washing dishes, taking out trash, cleaning bathrooms, cutting grass, making beds - these are all scrub chores.  However, my analogy breaks down a bit here, because rather than giving all these things away to get the chore of laundry, I would eagerly take all these things in return for giving away laundry, and consider myself to have gotten the better part of the deal.  I'm not trying to obtain the superstar chore, I'm trying to get rid of it.  It's like laundry has gone a bit too far with its salary demands, and now I'm trying to unload it.  Needless to say, Laundry's jersey will not be retired and fondly displayed in the stadium when Laundry is gone.  Jersey won't get washed, either.

Before you chastise me for failing to recognize how good I have it with my high-tech washing machine and my state-of-the-art dryer, please know that it isn't really these aspects of the process that get under my skin.  If I had to use a washboard down at the river and hang clothes up on a line after, it wouldn't be much worse than it is now.  This is because the worst part of laundry, in my opinion, is folding and putting away the clothes.  I'm not sure what it is about this task that is so bothersome to me.  When you wash dishes and put them away, you just....well....wash them and put them away.  But with laundry, you have to fold everything, and open and shut drawers in your dresser, and maybe turn things right side-out that have turned inside-out in the dryer.  It can drive a man to violence I tell you.  Raging, spitting, pulsing violence, with the slight fragrance of a spring shower.  Aaauugghh I hate ing laundry and all the sorting and ing folding!

Don't even get me started on ironing.  Let's just say that I haven't ironed anything in years, and I set an alarm to go off when the dryer is done so that I can immediately snatch my dress shirts out of the dryer and hang them up.  I buy "wrinkle free" dress shirts, exclusively, but I'm not taking any chances.

Is that the last load? Of your life? No? Then there is no
reason for you to be smiling.

In the end, I think my issue with laundry is the time investment.  With dishes, it's not going to take more than 15 minutes, even if you've used numerous pots and pans.  When cutting the grass, you might spend awhile doing it, but you're covering a lot of ground.  Cleaning bathrooms might be unpleasant, but there's a real feeling of accomplishment when it's done.  But with laundry, you spend all this time putting stuff in the washer and getting it out and putting it in the dryer and getting it out and then sorting it and folding it and putting it away, all for relatively little ROI, it seems.  Sure, you might get to wear a clean shirt, but the cleaning happened at step 1.  I have a really hard time being dispassionate about this, so I'm going to personalize it here and say that laundry is a rather ungrateful lot.  It takes and takes and takes, and doesn't give much back.  It wants to be pampered and folded neatly and put in its proper drawer, but then it just sits around doing nothing.  If I could pick a fight with laundry I would totally beat its ass.

So, despite the fact that we just got done with a really relaxing, pleasant holiday that was all about thankfulness, I have to say that I am not thankful for laundry.  Now if you'll excuse me, the dryer just buzzed.