Laundry

Folding laundry. What a darn simple way to contribute to the household and get some points with my wife. Heck, I can even do it while I watch t.v.!  True Blood and tanktops.  Dexter and denim.   Shortly after my folding debut, I announced to my wife that I would fold the laundry for the second week in a row.  Imagine my surprise at her softspoken response: "Um, no, that's o.k."  She didn't even look me in the eye. "Why not?" I asked, quizically. Her explanation: "Well, you kind of do it wrong." Do it wrong?  What's to do?  Fold, repeat. No lathering, no rinsing - its a simple ONE-step process.   But apparently, something prevented me from being successful at a chore that a semi-trained space monkey should be able to complete.

It turns out that I folded shirts the wrong way.  Who knew? I never thought I would regret taking "Shop" instead of "Home Ec." in High School. But now I did. My pathetic excuse for a birdhouse, the building of which almost cost me a finger, was now long gone. The opportunity to build it could have been traded for the lifelong skill of "shirt folding".  Perhaps law school was the wrong choice after all.  Instead of 3 years of study in the nation's capital, 2 hours of training at Banana Republic would have better prepared me with more useful life skills.  Maybe then I would have known that you should NEVER fold a shirt down the middle.  You must fold in the arms instead.

That could have been my "out." I could have feigned an incurable inability to properly fold shirts and been forever free of this mundane household task.  But the perfectionist in me reared its forsaken head.  I insisted I could be taught the correct way to fold. I demanded a demonstration and quickly learned the way of my Jedi folding master.

Sure it was easy. But "easy" swiftly begets "boring." Even with my DVR and Netflix to entertain me I quickly got sick of folding. Especially when my iPad was sitting next to me, beckoning like a mythological Siren. "Come on," it would say as it watched me fold. "Wouldn't you rather check George Takei's Facebook Status than organize your kids' socks?" Yes. Yes I would!

But I stayed strong. I forced myself to finish folding all 37 loads of laundry each week before rewarding myself with another Scrabble loss. The good news was that I could get through half a season of back episodes of Mad Men during each folding session.

But, Lord all the clothes!!!!  Where does all of it come from?  How many freaking kids do we have anyway?  How is this possibly only one week's worth of laundry?  What do they do, bring two changes of clothes to school every day?  Do they run home and shed their daytime outfits to cleanse themselves of the oppression that is Elementary School?  Are they CIA operatives requiring several daily identities?  Or maybe they are harboring refugees in their rooms. Children from third world countries whose parents couldn't afford clothes. Escaping their homelands to live out their childhood American dreams of wearing tiny Ed Hardy T-shirts and Justice jeggings.

How many sets of pajamas does a 7 year old need to get through one night of sleeping?  I imagined him trying them on at bedtime. "Nope, I'm just not feeling SpongeBob tonight," he says, stripping off the first set and tossing it into the laundry. "Let's try football.  Nope, that's not right either," as the second set follows the first. And so on ...

It's not just the kids, though.  I eyed my own clothing and took a quick inventory.  I really wore that shirt this week?  What about those exercise clothes?  What are they doing here? I recall thinking about the gym at 6:30 several mornings. But did I actually make it there?  Unlikely.

I wracked my brain for some explanation.  Wasn't there somyething in one of the Harry Potter books about elves and clothing?  Or was that shoes?  Anyway, I concluded that our house is infested with laundry elves. Little troublemakers who take our clothes off the shelves and out of the drawers and throw them in the laundry. Sometimes they even pour food on them to make them look worn. This must be the answer. There is no other logical conclusion. Just elves.

So now, when a shirt is occasionally found in a drawer folded incorrectly, we know it's the elves.

Pillows

I'm very particular. It's really annoying but I am whom I am.  

One of my peculiar particularities is that I only sleep well on my own carefully tested and chosen combination of pillows. I have three.  I rest my head on two and I use the third as a semi-socially acceptable adult substitution for a teddy bear. Or as I call it, a "snuggle pillow."

The two "head" pillows are a complementary pair consisting of a mushy soft bottom pillow and a slightly firm yet yielding top pillow. Scientific testing has determined this to be the correct combination I require for what passes as a decent night's sleep. 

The "snuggle pillow" is spongy and squeezable. It is for wrapping your body around during nocturnal contortions. 

So the problem arises once a month on a Tuesday night. Our house cleaner comes on Tuesdays and she rotates washing the bed sheets in each of our four bedrooms each week. I don't keep track of this rotation so I never know what week is Master Bedroom week. In fact, I really don't think about it at all until I lay my weary head down approximately one hour later than I intended to be retiring.  I have summoned all remaining will to brush, rinse, clean, change and plop into bed. It is at that exact moment that I discover the "pea" under the mattress. My sixth sense of comfort detects that something is awry in the Pillowdom. My neck is at an angle 1.6 degrees too high. My legs drape over a pillowcase filled with mashed potatoes. This is all wrong and I don't have the strength to deal with it.  After years of this almost monthly occurrence, I have developed a Pavlovian response consisting of anxiety, anger and immaturity.  

If my wife is lucky she has not yet crawled into bed. She will not have to endure my pre-teen-like fit and antics. If she is not so fortunate, she will be awoken by some huffing, puffing and general grumbling. She will barely make out words and phrases like "again!" and "she does this on purpose" accompanied by some dramatic gestures as I strip the pillows of their mismatched garments. 

To facilitate the righting of the wrong, I have tatooed each of the pillows with their proper vertical daytime location. This branding allows for swift identification and reorganization, leading to a succinct conclusion to the inconvenience. Unless... 

On occasion, the house cleaner will be so negligent and careless as to not only rearrange the pillowcases of my pillows but to also actually allow them to socialize and co-mingle with their female counterparts from the other side of the bed. In her own haste to accomplish her tasks and conclude her cleaning day, she may occasionally (presumably unknowingly) conduct a pillow swap. One (or more) of my pillows may remain with my wife's pillows, replaced by the foreign feel of one (or more) of my wife's inferior pillows. 

Pity the spouse who must learn that her status is secondary to that of a pillow.  While I fully appreciate and respect the value of well earned sleep to a working wife and mother of 2, no sleeping angel will come between me and my own prerequisite for a good night's slumber. Should one of my pillows be located beneath my wife's sleeping head, I cannot be held responsible for the selfless act required for its retrieval.  Fortunately, usually a gentle verbal request will suffice; but I am not above a Navy Seal style extraction, should it become necessary. 

Once the recovery is complete, order is restored to my nest and I can finally rest easy ... until next month.