Laundry blogging, so to speak
Feb. 14th, 2010 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienThat was ... rather more epic than usual. To be fair, it was three weeks' worth of laundry rather than the usual two, and including several pairs of winter-weight pants, but I still wasn't expecting it to be that hard.
The laundry room is about two hundred yards from my apartment, and I tend to do laundry in parallel rather than in series. A typical (for scientist-values of typical, meaning ideal) session involves sorting the laundry, bundling it up and carrying it over to the laundry room, dumping it into two or three machines, adding detergent and money, coming back half an hour later to move stuff to the dryers, and then retrieving it from the dryers forty-five minutes after that. Three trips; about twelve hundred yards. If I'm being really efficient, I pick up mail on the way back from the first trip and run up to Trader Joe's during the drying phase.
Today ... didn't work out as efficiently as usual. The first hitch was that three weeks' accumulation turned out to be more than I could carry in one trip. So I bundled the dark/cold load in a sheet and took that over separately, decided it was two loads, started them, left the sheet in a third machine and went back for the rest. By the time I got back, the free machine I'd been hoping to use for my fourth load was taken -- and I didn't have my jug of detergent. I stuffed everything into the one free machine (the one I'd "reserved" with my sheet), went back to get the detergent, started my third load (warm) and then waited the few remaining minutes for loads 1 and 2 to finish so I could re-use one of the machines. Load 1 went into the dryer, load 4 (light/cold) went into the washer ... and I went back home again for more quarters, waited for load 3 to finish, threw that in a third dryer, and then waited some more for load 4 so that could go in the second drier with load 2. (These were not full loads.) At that point everything was in the dryers, and I made a quick raid on Trader Joe's -- about a half-mile round trip -- and returned to the laundry room as soon as the groceries were put away. It ended up taking three trips to get everything home, so that was ... seven round trips, plus extra hanging-around time. At least it wasn't raining or uncomfortably hot.
The laundry room is about two hundred yards from my apartment, and I tend to do laundry in parallel rather than in series. A typical (for scientist-values of typical, meaning ideal) session involves sorting the laundry, bundling it up and carrying it over to the laundry room, dumping it into two or three machines, adding detergent and money, coming back half an hour later to move stuff to the dryers, and then retrieving it from the dryers forty-five minutes after that. Three trips; about twelve hundred yards. If I'm being really efficient, I pick up mail on the way back from the first trip and run up to Trader Joe's during the drying phase.
Today ... didn't work out as efficiently as usual. The first hitch was that three weeks' accumulation turned out to be more than I could carry in one trip. So I bundled the dark/cold load in a sheet and took that over separately, decided it was two loads, started them, left the sheet in a third machine and went back for the rest. By the time I got back, the free machine I'd been hoping to use for my fourth load was taken -- and I didn't have my jug of detergent. I stuffed everything into the one free machine (the one I'd "reserved" with my sheet), went back to get the detergent, started my third load (warm) and then waited the few remaining minutes for loads 1 and 2 to finish so I could re-use one of the machines. Load 1 went into the dryer, load 4 (light/cold) went into the washer ... and I went back home again for more quarters, waited for load 3 to finish, threw that in a third dryer, and then waited some more for load 4 so that could go in the second drier with load 2. (These were not full loads.) At that point everything was in the dryers, and I made a quick raid on Trader Joe's -- about a half-mile round trip -- and returned to the laundry room as soon as the groceries were put away. It ended up taking three trips to get everything home, so that was ... seven round trips, plus extra hanging-around time. At least it wasn't raining or uncomfortably hot.
