If you remember last semester when I forgot to put my favorite sweatshirt in the wash, you know that this isn’t my first low caused by the struggle of doing laundry. If you didn’t read that blog, the moral of the story is that the washers and dryers lock when you start them, so you can’t stop them mid cycle (even if you forget to put something in). I hope you can all learn from my laundry lows; I know they teach me some valuable lessons.  

It was Sunday, February 19. I had a long weekend at THON, and quite honestly, I was just over it. I have concluded that I’m not a THONner. It was fun, but not worth the pain in the arches of my feet or how terrible I felt after sleeping a total of four hours over the weekend. 

But, despite my exhaustion, I had to do my laundry. I was out of clothes. I dragged my giant laundry basket all the way to the basement. Yes, dragged. It’s supposed to roll, but the wheels have stopped working so it makes a scraping sound all the way down the hallway and is extremely difficult to pull. Add my dysfunctional basket to the long, long list of why I hate laundry day (my crankiness about my basket was not helped by sleep deprivation from THON).  

I made it to the laundry room and put everything in the washing machine. I had produced two full loads of clothes, more than my usual, and I was dreading having to fold and put away all of my laundry later that night. On top of that, it was also sheet-washing day, meaning I would have to put my entire bed back together when my laundry was done. Overall: ugh. 

While I waited for the wash cycle to finish, I watched a movie for my French class about the crusades. I almost fell asleep, despite the director’s best efforts to keep me engaged with bloody battles. It was not a bad movie, but I was so exhausted nothing could keep me awake.

Finally, after 37 minutes in the washer and 50 minutes in the drier, my laundry was done. My timer beeped (waking me up from my half-slumber), and I shuffled my way down to the basement. 

I opened my dryer and pulled out my clothes. They were still wet. I must’ve had too big of a load so the drier didn’t work properly. Usually, I have two loads in the washing machine and only one load in the drier. My system has never failed me, but apparently my clothes don’t dry all the way when I’m exhausted and cranky.

As I was removing my damp clothes from the dysfunctional drier, I started thinking. What should I even do? Running the drier again would mean waiting 50 more minutes, and I really didn’t want to do that. I just wanted to get my laundry out of the way and go to bed. I also didn’t want to pay for another load.

Leaving my clothes out to dry, like the extra load, would mean that I’d have to wait to put them away, and again, have to stay up later.

That’s when I noticed it. My sock looked a little funny. It was all rolled up, so I couldn’t really tell what was going on, but it looked a little pink. I pulled it out of the little ball it had knotted itself into, and yes, in addition to being damp, it was definitely pink. I pulled out my white hoodie, and that too was slightly pink. Not enough to make anything unwearable, but just enough of a tint to be noticeable in good lighting.

I found the culprit of the pink: my maroon hoodie. The dye was splotchy and had clearly been rubbed off on my other clothes.

That hoodie must’ve gone through a lot in that wash cycle, because its string had also been pulled out of the hood. 

Have any of you ever tried to rethread a hoodie string? Into a hoodie that is still damp? The damp hoodie makes the string stick, and generally, it is so hard to get the string all the way through the tiny little noodle-shaped channel in the hoodie. Threading a hoodie string is one of those things where you don’t know how annoying and tedious it is until you have to do it. 

Leaving the string out isn’t an option (in the long term), because the hoodie looks weird without it. It also looks weird because parts of the dye were washed away (and washed into my other clothes), but we won’t talk about that. I can’t fix the faded hoodie or my pink socks, but at least I can fix the string. Maybe. I left it half-threaded because I got sick of trying. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my laundry trauma and my low of the week. Lesson learned: don’t wash whites with maroon hoodies, and don’t procrastinate your laundry until after THON. 

This week’s high is that THON is over, so I don’t have to wake up at 5:30 am this weekend. Oh wait, I do, because I have to drive to a horse show. Yay. I’m still a little irritable, if you can’t tell.