laundry day

I know I'll end up hearing more than I want to, but where does Judeo-Christian tradition get the idea that Moses wrote the first five books?  Surely he had to hear about most of that stuff from somebody else, or maybe God just whispered it into his ear. 

There's really nothing on night time tv for me.  I used to like some sitcoms, but they are all gone now.  I am ashamed to admit that I used to watch Survivor, but I can't take it anymore.  The idiots and the scheming were okay, but they got into the habit of making speeches about how Survivor was the leading force in their life, taught them courage or love or whatever.

For awhile I was watching the murder channel, but for some reason they dropped the more lurid shows that I liked, and sometimes I felt a little guilty about enjoying the stories about real people who got killed.  Lately I discovered an obscure network. Heroes and Icons, that shows reruns of Hill Street Blues, one of my favorite cops shows of yore where the cops aren't always as pure as the driven snow and the crooks aren't all scum. 

I notice though, that you get a different kind of commercial on these obscure channels.  Instead of cars and over the counter drugs and Geico (Progressive, with that goofy Flo has some pretty good commercials, strange that something as boring as car insurance should have the best commercials), you get commercials for those for-profit ripoff schools and California psychics.  Whatever happened to the commercials where all these hot babes were lounging around in their lingerie just waiting for you to call and chat them up?  Or how about where the guy drove his snazzy convertible up the driveway to his mansion and babes spilled out of the car and out of the house just waiting to jump his bones while he stepped aside for about a minute to tell you about the book he wrote that you could buy and become as rich as him with only working about ten hours a week.


Wringers, reminds me of basements,  Between the kitchen and the dining room in the little hallway was this plain little door that opened up into this whole dark world, the stairs were a little rickety and it smelled of soap because right at the bottom of the stairs was the washing machine.  I seem to remember a wringer being attached to it.

There would be a dryer later, but not in the days of my youth.  In the days of my youth the whole mess was put in a basket and hauled out to the backyard.  Up and down the block in the backyards that ran parallel to each other between the backdoors and the garages the mothers were hanging the wash.  This would be a Monday of course.  One of the charms was that every mother was doing the same thing on the same day, so all the backyards blossomed together.  The sheets were like the sails of a mighty ship and the ladies' undies were racy, and your own embarrassing, and the whole block smelled of soap.

Every now and then I am walking through some neighborhood, it doesn't have to be a Monday, mothers don't do everything in unison anymore, but from some exhaust pipe connected to a laundry room in some apartment building will come that smell of laundry soap, and I am taken right back.

Right back to when our moms were young and strong and we were cute I suppose.  Was it fun for the moms, going down the lines with clothespins in their mouths, on a warm summer midmorning with clean clothes billowing in the wind, or was it drudgery?  We kids playing underfoot and shooed away lest we knock the clothes down somehow, would just go on to something else that tickled our fancy, but for the moms there was no choice, the clothes had to be taken down and folded, and some of it would have to be ironed (Tuesday?) and inserted into several different dresser drawers, and day by day dirtied and hampered and the whole dirty mess would be back in the basement on Monday for the whole cycle to recur.

I am sure we never asked her then, if it was drudgery or pleasure, but if we had I expect that the question would have been meaningless for her, it had to be done.


So if you lose electricity do you still get some water from the pressure tank, but once that is gone are you out of water?

It's a big bummer for me, Trump not being in the debate tonight, though possibly he will show up because you never know what he will do.  But maybe without him all the dwarves will turn on that giant Cruz (hard to think of him as giant, that weaselly little rat face with the high pitched nasal squeal).  That might be interesting, Rubio is quick with a knife, though Jeb will probably end up cutting himself.  Your man Rand could shine, but he hasn't shone much sheen in the past.