Laundry Day: the sequel

 

One of the hazards of my schedule with Viviane:  if the water happens to be off when she comes, there is very little she can do here. That's what happened yesterday. Thursday is usually laundry day, so I was extremely surprised to walk into the compound after school (having left the car outside) and not see any clothes hanging on the line. When I went into the bathroom, though, I understood: the water was off. It obviously had been off since the morning. 

I was extremely thankful that Dela had reminded Karen (in my presence, so I also benefitted) to keep some water on hand. There are some garments that I have only 7 of, so if the laundry doesn't get done on laundry day, I'm in trouble. I collected a very small amount of clothes to wash yesterday. It was 2:30, so there would only be about 3 hours of daylight for drying. Another moment of thankfulness: my mother taught me years ago that, if you're just washing out a couple of things, it helps to roll them up in a towel and squeeze out the excess moisture. I usually do that by sitting on the rolled up towel! Everything that I needed yesterday evening and this morning got dry in time.

Fridays school lets out at 11:30, so I had a longer period of daylight. I arrived home after lunch and set up to do some laundry. Fortunately, the water was still on. I washed all my whites and lights and got them hung up. I had hoped to do more, but just that bit took a long time--about an hour and a half--and wore me out. So I will have to do my darker colors tomorrow.

Although I have the drying rack set up in the living room, most of the clothes are just a bit damp around the edges. 

I made two resolutions while I was doing the laundry:

1) find out where Viviane sets up to do it and buy a hose to connect to the outdoor faucet. It took about 6 buckets of water to fill up the washbasins for laundry. That means 6 trips across the driveway and back. Not really a long time, but the trips with the full bucket are not fun.

2) buy the washing machine hose for getting the water from the faucet to the machine. I think that's all I need to set the machine up, and then I can do the laundry myself.

By the way, I did not use the block of soap that Viviane uses, in addition to the powdered detergent. So the clothes are probably not as clean as she would have got them. But I will try not to think of that when I put them on!