New and Improved, with stain fiGHTING BLEACH!

It's become a bit of a game for me, I guess.  I've become obsessed.  When you're under-employed and you have lots of time on your hands the challenge, really, is to find different and interesting ways to fill up your day until the one whom you adore comes home again to entertain you with tales from the world of business.

For me, filling up my day has become an obsession with clean laundry the likes of which I could never have predicted.  When I was a kid one of my chores around the house was to do laundry.  Not such a big deal when you live in a high-rise apartment with a laundry room with no less than twenty washers and dryers.   Laundry gets done in ninety-minutes (or less if that mean old lady from the 7th floor is pacing behind you to get your dryer).  But now?  Now, when I have only one of each machine, well the act of doing laundry can fill up an entire day!  

Oh, sure, everyone does laundry every once in a while...once or twice a week, I'm sure.  But lately?  Me?  I'm washing, fluffing and folding every single day.   It's gotten to the point that I cannot walk past our changing room without glancing in the laundry basket to see if it is still indeed in a state of glistening white emptiness.  I quest for emptiness daily.  

The one whom I adore has a philosophy on laundry that goes something like this:  cram as much as you can into the machine and turn it on.  Colour, type of fabric, the need (or not) for the gentle-cycle seldom comes in to play when he's doing the laundry.  But when I do the laundry?  Oh, I have countless ways to sort...by colour...by fabric...by the need to bleach or not...delicates...dress shirts...towels...linens...I can take 10 different items in the laundry basket and create 8 different loads - I do not joke.

Even though I did 3 loads on Friday and we were out of town for half the weekend, on Monday, there were 5 new loads of laundry to be washed and dried.   Aha!  Something to do TODAY!   Game ON!   How many different sorts of laundry can I create?  

Part of the game for me is to see if I can wash & dry his no-iron dress shirts and get them on hangers before a wrinkle sets in.  This of course means emptying them out of the dryer the second the timer goes off.  Some days I can beat the clock...most days though, he has to do some some smoothing out before getting dressed, because despite my obsession with all things laundry, it does not include ironing.

Another game I've created for the game that is the doing of the laundry?  USR.  You know there's UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) and now there's USR, Ultimate Stain Removal.  First, you sort your laundry.  As you sort the clothes review each item to determine if it needs the extra attention of a squirt of SHOUT! or bleach or the very best!  the 20-mule team power of Borax.  It's an old-fashioned stain remover to be sure...not as sexy as SHOUT! or Tide-stick, but it gets the job done...just like it did in Grandma's day.  Of course it does!  It has the power of all those mules pulling the stains off your clothes.  Of course, none of those stain-removers would be necessary if I could ever eat a meal without spilling part of it on the shelf that has become my chest...but that's a blog for another day.

So, yes, this is what I now do.  I do laundry and then I blog about it. Now that OxiClean's Billy Mays is dead, maybe I can GET HIS JOB!

Where Is Eva Gabor Now?

If you’re a child of the 60’s or a fan of Nick at Nite, TV Land or the Deja View channels you may recall the TV show, Green Acres, with Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor.  It’s the story of two New Yorkers who traded “city life” in Manhattan with it’s 5^th Avenue, Broadway, Central Park and penthouse suite for a old farm and a new life in the country.  The series of events that ensues while these two transplants figure out life in the country is pure slapstick and silliness.  Little did I know watching this show 40-odd years ago that it would foreshadow what was to become of my life.

Oh, sure, I never had the penthouse suite, but I had all the other trappings – a high-profile (read high stress) career; a taste for fine cuisine and even finer wines; the desire and ability to travel to places far and wide.  Let’s don’t forget about the shoes…oh, the shoes!  I had countless pairs of cute, sassy, serious, swanky, hip, cool and not to mention stylish shoes!  I was living in one of the best cities in the world, Vancouver, and loving every second of my life there.  I had some of the best friends I would ever know and in a word, my life was perfect.  Okay, not so much perfect as say…perfectly fine.  Of course there were things I would change (who wouldn’t?), but more or less, my version of city life was well, perfectly urban.  Oh, how things have changed.

One might ask how does a high-paid, equally high-stressed, but exceptionally creative and talented career woman come to find herself marooned on an island, living in the country, under-employed and wondering what to do with herself?

Honestly, it's because I fell in love.  That's how I came to live on this little island in the Northumberland Straight.  It's how I came to be "self-employed" (or "under-employed" depending on when you're reading this).  It's how I came to be sitting on my front porch, in my rocking chair, basking in the sun, looking out over our version of Green Acres and wondering to myself where the hell is Eva Gabor now and what will I do with my life next?

You'll have to check back here to learn how the story before the story began.