Horrible! Yet Somehow Humbling

The dryer took a crap the other day while the warden was drying a load of his clothes. Stopped spinning and refused to start again. I've been thinking for a while that it was gonna die soon but my thinking was mostly along the lines that since nobody but me cleans out the lint trap, it was going to catch fire and burn the house down. So I guess it could have been worse. Also it had been losing power steadily for the last couple months (but I actually think that if the warden had gotten back there and cleaned out all the years of fuzz, that problem would have gone away).

So.. here I am hanging clothes on a clothesline in the back yard. I hate this because of how rainy the weather has been and I don't think of things like taking down the clothes on the line (why would I) when it starts raining (inevitable, with the way this spring is going). I also hate it because instead of taking 35-40 minutes to dry a load and get the next load in there, it takes more like 3 hours for one load to dry enough to put away.

On the other hand this whole experience is humbling in a way. I remember when Moe was a baby and it was just her and I living in our little shotgun shack in Rocky Ford, Colorado. Those were the days when we lived off less money for the entire month than I now spend on my car payment. I used to use cloth diapers on her, which meant that I was perpetually in a state of laundry doing. (Come to think of it, I still am, but I have more kids now...) I didn't even HAVE a dryer then so every load got hung outside. I got pretty good at it too, being able to hold something like 1,000 clothespins in one hand in order to get everything pinned in a systematic way.

I dunno if there's a lesson to be learned here; I suppose there should be some kind of deep moral about having come a long way from those days through a combination of hard work and perseverance, but instead it seems more like I'm just kinda spoiled now. And I probably pay too much for my car.