Comments on: Spinster aunt emits guffaw at Sarah Haskins vid

By: Brianne

Brianne — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:59:42 +0000

I love Sarah Haskins. LOVE. I’m not saying I’d go gay for Sarah Haskins, but I am.

By: Frumious B.

Frumious B. — Sun, 31 May 2009 15:50:07 +0000

Been there, done that. Grew up with 2 adults, 4 kids, no dryer.

By: jezebella

jezebella — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:12:25 +0000

I note that you’re only doing laundry for one. Now try that with a kid or three.

By: Frumious B.

Frumious B. — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:29:13 +0000

I only use the dryer for sheets and other linens. Trousers and button downs hang on the shower bar in my unventilated bathroom. T-shirts and socks hang on the drying rack in my approx. 200 sq ft living room. Underpants hang on the octopuss hang-dry-thingy I bought at Ikea. I love that thing. For such tiny garments, underpants sure take up a lot of room on the drying rack. I can hang so much more with that puss. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty damn privileged, but at $1.50 ea wash and dry, I run out of quarters pretty fast. By hanging stuff, I go through quarters more slowly, and my clothes last longer. I don’t mind not being able to walk through the living room, and I can skip a shower for a day while stuff dries on the bar. Hell, I skip showers even when I don’t have wash hanging on the bar. I’ve toyed with rigging up a retractable clothes line for sheets in the approx. 150 sq ft bedroom, which I also don’t mind not being able to walk through, but I am afraid it would just rip out of the walls. I don’t know how to hang stuff on plaster and lath. That was all just a long winded way of saying count me into the dryers-who-needs-em category.

By: virago

virago — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:03:22 +0000

When I was married, my than husband use to complain that when I did laundry, I shouldn’t pair socks by putting them together and turning the top of the socks inside out so that they stick together. He complained that this stretched out the top of his socks, and they didn’t stay up. Funny, he never did any laundry, but he could tell me how to match socks. Of course, when I suggested that he do his own laundry, he gave me a dirty look. Well, sad to say, I never did learn because I still paired socks my way, and he shut up after a while. And btw, I never stretched out the top of my socks, and to my knowledge, I never seen any of his socks stretched out either. And as for cooking. OMG, if I wasn’t home to cook dinner, I think he would have starved to death literally if we didn’t live by a bunch of fast food. I went away for the weekend, and there was a ton of garbage from Burger King, McDonalds, Taco Bell, you name it. His mother even called me up and asked why I didn’t cook extra for her son so that he would have food when I was gone. For crying out loud, she expected me to do all that extra cooking only to have him refuse to eat any of it because he would’ve had to heat it up, and he would’ve gone to McDonalds anyway. I told her she should have trained him better. I’m glad she lived in another state. In fact, I was glad that he did too after we divorced.

By: Jezebella

Jezebella — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:28:38 +0000

It wasn’t you that seemed to be sneering, it was someone else.

By: JenniferRuth

JenniferRuth — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:45:21 +0000

Jezebella, I didn’t mean to sound like I was sneering, I just thought it was interesting. When I used to use a laundromat it didn’t even have any dryers! I just had a large clothes horse that I was an expert at fitting the maximum number of clothes on.
It’s funny, because now I live in a place with a machine of it’s own that also has a dryer setting, but I barely ever use it because I just became so used to hanging things up.

So, no sneering from me – in fact, I am surprised that people do sneer at dryers. I know of literally no-one apart from myself who has one – it makes me feel privileged. Kinda like having a dishwasher!

By: Amananta

Amananta — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:03:24 +0000

Huh.
I was raised to do laundry and was regularly doing laundry for the five people in our family by the time I was 12 or 13. And if I got something wrong I was scolded for my carelessness.
25 years later and I’m… still doing everyone’s damn laundry. In fact, it’s laundry day. I’m sitting here avoiding doing it now. It’s the trip up and down the stairs I hate, really. The machines are in the basement.
As far as dryers go, yes I use one. I live in an apartment with no back yard to speak of, no clothesline, not to mention it freezes half the year here and its raining today. How am I to hang three people’s laundry to dry inside? I suppose people (female people only, I presume) used to hang the laundry outside to freeze solid in the winter (I can’t imagine how it actually got dry), but as I understand it, people had fewer clothes then, and also tolerated clothes not being as clean as we demand them to be nowadays.
Screw all that stain removing stuff. I just throw it all in the washer. I can’t be bothered. If people don’t want stains on their clothes, they should be more careful with them.

By: Jezebella

Jezebella — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:34:19 +0000

JenniferRuth, I also mentioned laundromats, which is where most Americans without their own appliances go to do their laundry. Many on foot, and hauling wet laundry back home, on foot, makes less sense than throwing it in the dryer. I should also note that most apartment complexes here forbid the hanging of laundry outdoors, even if you are lucky enough to have a balcony of your own. I just think it’s shitty to sneer at people for using dryers, frankly.

By: JenniferRuth

JenniferRuth — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:34:10 +0000

Jezebella – funny, because I would regard *having* a dryer as a privilege. In my world, privileged people have a dryer, the rest of us have clothes horses. Maybe it is an American thing…