My Shorts Are In a Twist

I have really thought and planned this out carefully, Friends.

Now listen, Babies, you can laugh at me all you want to over this, and I am still going to feel it:

My shorts are all in a twist because my Laundry Schedule is all messed up by this sensational Sparkling Isolation we're in.

If you thought Sheldon Cooper was quaint because of his much-ballyhooed Bathroom Schedule, then you can go right ahead and find me Utterly Adorable over my color-coded, carefully-written-out Laundry Schedule.  I am fine with that.  F-I-N-E fine!

It took me years to develop this thing, and I did it because when I just did the wash all willy-nilly like that, I'd wind up having this huge task to do on one day of the week, I'd get overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, and then we'd wind up wearing wrinkly Wranglers wrested from the bottom of a pile of clean wash stacked as high as my head.  I've used a laundry-sorter hamper system since way back, so my wash gets sorted as we take it off, and that was a real time-saver, but it hadn't helped with the Overwhelm.  A piece was missing.

Finally, I studied our laundry patterns and decided on the best days to wash the different loads of wash.  I finally landed on a system around Christmas the year my daughter was in kindergarten.  It took me that long to get a handle on the situation.

Some of the plan had been in place for years.  I'm a creature of habit, and I realized a long time ago that Sundays are the best day for changing out the bedding and towels.  Easy-peasy.  Mondays work great for my daughter's clothes and jammies, because then I can get her favorite clothes turned around and ready to wear again the next week (yesssss, of COURSE during a normal school year, we plan her outfits for the week out on Sunday and stack them in her five-day outfit sorter that hangs in her closet.  DON'T YOU?!) 

I put the "Undies" load on Monday, because if you say "Monday" like "Mondee," "Undees Mondees" just makes me chortle.  And as you've discovered by my other posts, I tend to run high-strung, so anything that I can do to crack myself the hell right up, I'm gonna do it.

Tuesdays and Saturdays are for Pants and Jeans.  I'm nursing along a really rad 14-year-old clothes-dryer that has a drying cabinet up top for stuff I don't want tumbling.  Pants and Jeans, if done once a week, don't really get too dry on the first go, so I gave a great deal of thought on how to optimize splitting them up for washing two days a week.  Tuesdays and Saturdays.  Then I round out Tuesdays with Delicates, which then dry in the aforementioned Top Cabinet of the dryer, and then Darks, which can dry in the tumbler.  No laundry logjam on Tuesdays, because I have carefully planned this the hell out!

Wednesdays are Colors and Whites.  Big whoop.  Except there's a lot of Tshirts in that whites load, and sometimes there aren't enough for a whole load on a week, so I hold 'em til the next week, but somehow having to fold ten or twelve or fourteen white Tshirts just seems like purgatory.  That's something I need to work on.  Embrace the suck, go with the flow. 

Thursdays are for my workout wear.  That stuff needs special considerations, because there's nothing I hate more than putting on clean workout gear only to turn my head mid-rep and smell the ghosts of workouts past, know what I mean, Jellybean?  I use Hex performance detergent, maybe DeFunkify, and let this soak.  Workout bras and headbands go in the lie-flat top cabinet of the dryer, workout pants, socks, and singlets go in the bottom tumbler. One load of five to seven workout outfits is delightfully light work for a Thursday. 

And because I'm in such good, flexible shape, I did not even dislocate my shoulders, patting myself on the back for this accomplishment, in case you were worried about that. 

Fridays are reserved for kitchen towels, which honestly are more of a once-a-month kind of thing because they're small and it takes a while to amass enough to justify turning on the washing machine for them.  But every Friday, scrubs.  My husband is a dentist.  Four days a week, he wears home his scrubs.  They go in their own load and I wash them with hot water, and put that Lysol laundry sanitizer in the machine.  I don't know if it really does anything, but it's peace of mind for me. 

But now that he's home all but one day a week, and his scrubs are being washed over at the office now and not even coming home until they're clean and folded, that's thrown my entire beautiful extremely well-thought-out, color-coded Laundry Schedule just completely off.  And guess what.  That is making me lose my shit just a little bit.  (Read: SO HECKIN' MUCH.  SO, SO VERY HECKIN' MUCH.)

The thing of it is, I'm not at all obsessive-compulsive, despite this whole post about a color-coded laundry schedule that I'm losing my shit over CV-19 blowing all to hell anyway, Kids.  If you were to come to my house, on a GOOD day, it would feel cluttered.  I try to keep walkways clear.  I vacuum multiple times a day.  But it's nothing for my house to be a great-big, dusty flustercluck.  If I applied myself on keepin' house in general the way I applied myself on that laundry schedule, I'd probably have me the kind of showplace I've only had when we refinanced the mortgage and I had a judgy Realtor coming in to take a gander at my lived-in abode. 

That's what makes all this Coronavirus Chaos really sting.  I had this one thing I felt Completely and Tyrannically in control of.  My laundry schedule.  And now, I'm having to wash my pants by the seat of my pants, if that makes any sense.  And I realize that this is totally a First World Problem.  But Babies, for right now, I live in the First World.  The small stuff is going to make me lose my shit big-time.  That's just how it is. 

Someday, all this will lift, and I take great comfort knowing that my Laundry Schedule will be one of the firstest first things to get back to crackalackin' like Normal.  Because unlike so many things about Old Normal, my color-coded Laundry Schedule flippin' WORKED!

:-)