Fun and games

Because being home with everyone is not enough of an adventure, our washing machine decided to throw in a little fun and games, as they say in “Father Goose”, one of my all-time favorite movies. I’ve been a Cary Grant fan for forever, and his role as a feisty curmudgeon opposite the proper Leslie Caron is just fabulous. We quote from it a lot throughout my family. Since you're home anyway, might as well watch it. 

Anyway, our washer and dryer are on our upper floor, so lest you panic and think there was a leak, or worse, a flood, that was not the kind of dramatics we experienced. No, this was more of a slow death. For months now it has sounded like an industrial washer, chugging and shuddering away as though it wanted to burst its seams. I did a small load of whites a few days ago and it was fine, perhaps a little smoky smelling when I pulled them out, nothing to write home about. The next load was a probably slightly-too-large load of darks. I remember thinking that I wasn’t hearing a lot of chugging and rattling and vibrating and the usual living-on-the-edge sound effects we’ve gotten used to.

When I pulled the load out, I noticed that they were still quite wet. Very wet. Hmm, let’s try the spin cycle and get some more water out.

Beep beep beep!

Spin cycle apparently finished while I’d been tied up monitoring who was on which device for what class, ad nauseum, I checked again.

Very wet. Wringable. Slightly dirty water.

Okay, the lighter stuff goes into the dryer and the sopping wet stuff comes with me. To the clothesline we go! Commence literal drip drying to start, and since it was 70 degrees, everything was probably 75% dry by the time I took them back in to pop them in the dryer.

However, now we have this:

So God bless my engineer husband who doesn’t mind taking things apart in his spare time. He had already ordered new bearings weeks ago in anticipation of this event, and he’s been working between meetings in our poor, sad probably 14 year old friend. Pretty sure we bought this set when we moved into The Best Nest when I was pregnant with Liam. No shame, faithful appliance, no shame. 

I had a different project today from the usual playing in the dirt since it is much less warm and much more windy. Like 25 miles an hour winds. Not a huge fan of being outside in it. Even the dogs are protesting. So I worked on a bookshelf that had been vomiting. Now our book nook is tidied up and will hopefully stay that way for a hot minute. I discovered an entire bin worth of books I haven’t read yet, so I better get crackin’!