Frozen Pants & Other Sundries

So after a debilitating weekend at the beach with my family, I retrieved my overly needy fish from my sister's moderately careful oversight and dragged myself home. That was when I noticed they needed cleaning.

I realize, certain dishes aside, the c-word hasn't been tossed around here too much. Don't be surprised! It's not that I like to let my place get filthy and therefore go long stretches without cleaning; it's that I ordinarily keep my place in such order that no grime can ever manage to accumulate.  Seriously, though, despite my grumpiness about my sudden stewardship over these little aquatic balls of misanthropy, I feel a real responsibility to keep them in oxygen and food pellets.  That's why, when I spotted their little tanks all clouded up with ammonia, I knew it was time to act.  After all, those fishies need me!

Those guys are slippery.  Really slippery.  It took me the better portion of half an hour to determine the best way to get them out of their tanks without killing them.  It would have been a huge help to me if I'd had a net of any sort, but...alackaday!  'Twas not to be, and I contented myself with picking out their little decorative rocks one by one, so they wouldn't be crushed unceremoniously underneath them when I tilted the whole tank over.  It was the only way to get them out!  I tried deep spoons and the like, but those fish can JUMP.  In essence, it took me 30 minutes to outsmart a couple of fish.  A couple of fish in a prisoner's dilemma.

After I got their tanks changed and fed the little upturned-jaws, I turned to my true challenge:  the laundry.  That despicable machine has haunted my nightmares for the past few days, but I decided to overcome it.  I frantically made several loops through my apartment, finding loose pieces of clothing with every circuit.  I am a man who suffers from chronic sock shortages, and now I know why -- my wife has been hiding them all beneath the couch!  I mean, who else could have done such a thing?  I'm such a victim.

I carefully sorted my clothes into neat piles of colored and whites, feeling like a disgusting racist for it.  However, past attempts at sartorial integration had gone poorly, so I knew the time had not yet come.  Deciding that I needed nice shirts for work much more than I needed more socks (having recently found the proverbial "motherlode"), I tossed the coloreds in first (this one's for you, Rosa!)

I filled that washer up as high as it could go, and then a teense bit more.  I got it running, set it to LARGE LOAD, and tossed a bit of soap in.  Somehow I managed to get some soap on my bed (soap!), but at least this was a liquid detergent and couldn't find its way into my nose.  Not unless I absent-mindedly wiped my soapy hand on my nose.  AND OF COURSE I WOULD NOT BE STUPID ENOUGH TO DO THAT.  SO, MOVING ON.

I got the washing machine running and went to distract myself with flights of fancy and planning my busy social calendar for the week.  Epochs later, I heard the washer grind to a halt and directly ran to throw my stuff in the dryer.  I did so without too much difficulty, until I dropped one of my lighter colored socks in amongst some of my darker white socks.  It was like a lit match falling into a pile of gunpowder.

My world ended.  Trains screamed on their tracks and derailed, transforming from vehicles of convenience to metal tombs.  Airplane turbines sputtered and died, dragging their sleek-lined chassis into the seas.  Millions of panes of glass shattered at once, defying nature to invent an equally heartrending sound.  I watched that sock fall into its nearly-identical brothers, mouth agape with horror at the prospect of ever finding it again.  Its collision with the pile of clothes was as silent as a newborn's eyes.  I was lost, adrift in a pile of clothing, doomed to search for a needle in a mountain of hooks.

Then I realized it was the only sock in the pile that was wet, and fished it out without much trouble.

No, friends, the trouble came thereafter.  I loaded my clothes quickly, and even checked that there was a dryer sheet and the ridiculous "dryer balls" that my wife insists on using.  I guess she's trying to convince herself that they aren't meant to be sex toys.  At least our clothes get to roll around with them, I guess.  I set the dryer to "towels," realizing this is a necessity where multiple pairs of jeans are involved, and went to lie down on the couch waiting for it to finish.  What a terrible mistake.  You can't just out-wait a dryer.  Those things are eternal.  I felt that I had no choice, since I had a huge pile of whites I still had to wash.  I figured I'd wait until the dryer was near-finished and then toss the whites in, so I could move as efficiently as possible.  

I failed completely to consider the power of the circadian on my biology.  As soon as my head hit the couch pillow, I fell into the deep, dreamless, not-very-refreshing sleep that I've grown used to over the past week-and-change.  I awoke in the morning, just minutes before work, to find that I hadn't gotten to the whites, my wife was still in Africa, and I had slept with my contacts in (a truly miserable experience).  I had to rush about, barely finding time to perform my morning ablutions, and eventually had to toss my still-roasting pants into the freezer to cool them to a wearable state.  But, as I hopped around the kitchen, frying in my own khakis, I noticed that my fish were swimming around happily in their freshly clean bowls.  I felt a small tinge of pride that, despite all my difficulties, I had managed to care for some living creatures.  Even if they couldn't appreciate or understand what I had done for them, the knowledge that I had managed to keep them alive injected a small bit of warmth into my old, cold soul.  Sometimes, I think, that's good enough.