The longer you live with someone, the more you discover about how little you know them. At least, this is true for me, when it comes to my husband. I have known this man since 2001, for over half my life, and have lived with him since 2003. And yet I have only recently discovered some things about him that baffle me completely. (Does anyone else recall the time when I learned he does not consider soup to be a meal???)
While I am the primary laundry-doer in our household, I don’t fold everything that I wash. This is not out of laziness, Internet. Well. Not solely out of laziness. My husband is not only the Better Folder of the two of us, he has folding preferences. I am sure I’ve mentioned before that he prefers to fold his own T-shirts. For that I am eternally grateful, because I am horrible at folding, especially when it comes to things that can’t be lined up edge to edge, like a towel or a blanket or a dishrag or another piece of fabric with straight and symmetrical edges. It’s not like I haven’t tried. I have. And yet, despite sometimes extreme effort, my attempts at folding T-shirts result in such lopsidedness and extreme variances in size of end product that frankly boggle the mind. My husband, possibly due to years in his youth spent working in clothing retail, possibly due to being a normal person and not folding challenged like his wife, can fold his T-shirts with seemingly no effort and end up with a stack of perfectly identical little rectangles. This is all to say: my husband prefers to fold his own T-shirts.
Okay, fine. But I can at least fold his pants, right? I fold my own jeans and leggings (the extent of my pants collection) and they make nice tidy stacks. I fold them once lengthwise, meeting one corner of the waist band to the other, so they look like a one-legged pant, and then fold them shortwise (what is the opposite of lengthwise? widthwise? I am explaining this very poorly), bringing the hem up to meet the waistband, and then fold them one last time so that the waist band touches the folded portion of the knee area. (This reminds me of that old elementary school exercise where one person has to explain step by step how to make a peanut butter sandwich and the other person has to follow each step literally, as if they have never experienced either peanut butter or jars or sandwiches before. You know: the explainer says, “Put the peanut butter on the bread” and the sandwich maker picks up the jar and puts it on the bag of bread.) What I am trying to say is that I make three folds and the jeans end up in a small square.
Fold 1.Fold 2.Fold 3. I don’t know why the pocket does this but I hate it thanks.
This is how I have folded everyone’s pants since time immemorial, including my husband’s jeans and work pants. Then some years ago I found out that that my husband preferred me to simply fold the pants in half, lengthwise, and leave them at that. Okay, weird, I thought, but whatever. Saves me two folds per pants pair, clearly a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of life. But as the years passed, I wondered why he was so adamant about the single fold. Because, in fact, when he puts his jeans/work pants away in our closet, he stacks them in neat little squares just like I stack my jeans.
It took a long time for this mild curiosity to develop into an actual question, which was, “If the end result is the same, why don’t I just fold your jeans for you?” To which he reluctantly told me that when I fold his jeans, he refolds them, and he feels bad about that, so he wants to relieve me of the initial fold. To which my response was, “WHY.” Which is when he admitted to me that when I fold his jeans/pants, I fold them backwards.
My jeans, folded my way.Still with the pocket issue. I STILL REFUSE TO IRON.My husband’s jeans, folded the opposite way.
This is a very, very long story to say that a) apparently people can fold jeans/pants differently, who knew, and b) apparently that can be bothersome to some people, and c) my husband and I are pants-folding opposites and I only just found out. (How do YOU fold your pants?)
(By the way, I have since been folding his jeans/pants the opposite way – although I still only make the single lengthwise fold – and it is surprisingly difficult to do! My brain has A Certain Way it believes folding should be done, and that is not it.) (It’s a feeling similar to folding your hands together differently than you normally do: if the left thumb normally sits on top of the right thumb, when you try to fold them so the right thumb is on top instead, it’s doable, but it’s weird.)
I have since kept my eyes open for other weird differences in our everyday trivialities and have come up with two others.
One has to do with filing. Picture a filing cabinet, with folders of paperwork for things you keep track of over time – utility bills, insurance statements, tax returns, etc. I think we can all agree that it makes sense to file these sorts of things chronologically, right? And yet, to my SHOCK, there are (at least?) two ways to do this.
When you open one of the folders, what is on top: the most recent bill/statement, or the oldest? Well, I do it one way and my husband does it the other way (the WRONG way) and that is absolutely insane to me. To make matters worse, at one point in our relationship, we maintained separate files, so some of the files use my system and some use my husband’s. I would almost rather transition ALL our files to his (wrong) system than to have two completely opposite filing methods in the same cabinet. MADNESS.
The other way we are opposites is in how we get out of the shower. Yes, I am really writing about this. Day-to-day minutiae is my favorite topic (next to food) and if you are new here, boy are you getting slapped right in the face with household nitty-gritty.
Our shower has a sliding glass door with two panels. You slide one panel over the other – so they overlap – to expose the opening to the shower. My husband slides both panels toward the front/faucet end of the shower to exit; I slide both panels to the back, wall end. I wonder if this has to do with our individual towel placement: my towel hangs just outside the faucet end of the shower; my husband’s is on the wall on the other end of the shower. Would we exit the shower differently if we hung our towels differently? Are there simply Front of Shower Exiters and Rear of Shower Exiters, just like some people are optimists and others are pessimists?
These are some of the very silly, inconsequential differences between us that are as charming (to me, at least) as they are perplexing. All of us are weird in our own weird ways. And I’m delighted to still be learning new things about this man I’ve loved for nearly a quarter century.
There are lots of other ways that he and I are Very Different. Some of them I know and accept: for instance, he is a Laundry Basket guy, and I am a Pile Clothing Into My Arms And Drip Socks All Over The Floor gal. But maybe (probably?) there are things I am yet unaware of. I hope we have time to discover all of them.
I have been dying to tell you that we got a new robot vacuum over the winter break. Actually, we got it at the very tail end of the break.
As you know, I adore my zooper with all my heart. I use it, oh, two or three times a day, mainly in the kitchen. Over the break, in addition to regular kitchen crumb fest, there was also debris from my giant glorious poinsettia (still, against all odds, alive) and then we sanded the workout area before we painted it so there was paint dust everywhere, and there always seem to be bits of leaves and sticks and pebbles of dog food all over our house at any given moment. Plus, instead of the house being occupied by mainly me, all three of us were home for two consecutive weeks. This combination resulted in a TON of zooping, let me tell you.
Why so messy, poinsettia?!
Oh and also – NICOLE, BRACE YOURSELF – there was a mouse. Carla, despite lots of instruction on how to not attract mice and bugs, had been a little lax in keeping snacks under wraps in our pantry. Early on in the break, she found a meat stick with a bite taken out of it and a Jolly Rancher with a bite taken out of it, and that was enough for me to do a deep clean of the pantry during which time I found Definitive Mouse Evidence.
I also found a teeny little crack in the pantry by the bottom of the door frame, which I filled in (temporarily) with Loctite mounting putty, which was on hand because I was hanging up holiday cards at the time. Next time the exterminator is here (he is ON THE SCHEDULE, believe me), I will ask him to replace the Loctite with something more durable.
We subsequently caught a mouse (please let it be the only mouse) and Carla has been, under supervision, much better about snack foods. But as you can imagine, my zooping of crumbs has been all the more diligent since that revolting discovery.
Shockingly, I am the only one in my family who seems to appreciate the act of zooping. I feel as though I am always the one doing it. Even though it is literally a chore on Carla’s chore chart. If I dare remind her to do it, she will flop bonelessly over the nearest surface and groan and ask me if I can do it, pleeeeeeeeeeeease, just this once, she haaaaaaaates it and it’s soooo looooooouuuuddddd. And honestly, the whole ordeal would have been done by then so often I just roll my eyes and do it. (Is this teaching her that flopping and groaning will be rewarded or is it picking my battles? As with everything about parenting: impossible to know if I am doing the right thing.)
Brief aside: When you were a kid, were you ever watching TV and your mom suddenly turned on the garbage disposal or started vacuuming in your vicinity and you were overcome with indignance that she would so thoughtlessly interrupt your TV viewing with such noise?!? (We also had a trash compactor as our kitchen garbage, which would mechanically compress the trash in the bin when you pressed a button. That, of course, also made a loud, TV-interrupting noise.)
Well, that happened to me frequently and I could never understand how my mother seemed to pick the exact worst time to be so annoying and loud. And now I am that mom. Because there is never a good time to execute a noisy chore, especially when you are all three together in one house for two weeks.
My kid will loudly and huffily object to the noise of the zooper anytime I operate it within an our-house-sized radius of wherever she is.
My husband, though he never said it in so many words, seems to feel about my zooping the same as Kid Me did toward my mother running the garbage disposal during Family Matters.
He mentioned, once or twice, that I seemed to be zooping quite a lot. To which I replied, I zoop two or three times daily, it’s just usually when you aren’t home. And then the zooper ran out of juice while I was ridding the workout room of paint dust, which shocked my husband. That had never happened in our old house! Well, the zooper works very hard and lasts a very long time but our current house is quite a bit larger than the old one. (And the floors of the old house hid dirt much better.) Do not blame the zooper; the zooper is not at fault.
After nearly two weeks of enduring twice or thrice daily zoopings, my husband set to researching robot vacuums. The brand I am most familiar with is Roomba, but he said reviews of Roombas are less favorable than he expected. I am also aware of Eufy, thanks to Elisabeth, which he said gets great reviews. But in the end he went with the Roborock Q5, mainly because it has a cool name. (Looks like the Q5 is no longer available, but the Q10 is and it’s $200 cheaper!) Just kidding. He did extensive research and this was the one that he deemed best. I am 99% sure he told me in excruciating minute detail all the specific reasons it was better for us than the others were, but I seem to have a blank space in my head where Roborock statistics should be. The main factor I remember is that it was on a really good sale (and still is, as of this writing!).
As pretty much everyone who has ever purchased a robot vacuum says: I do not know why we waited so long to get one. It is THE BEST. We were so excited when it arrived. As a family, we all watched it trundle around the main floor, mapping every room, and charmingly bumping into obstacles as it got used to where things were. We set it to clean and it bustled around picking up tiny scraps of plastic and bits of wax leftover from the Hanukkah candles and artificial pine needles from our tree and the aforementioned leaves/poinsettia buds/dog food and all the crumbs that accumulate as if from nowhere in our kitchen.
It is AMAZING. My floors have never been so clean. Rocky (that’s his name, of course) has an app (everything has an app, which I generally think is stupid, but I quite like Rocky’s app) and I can access it from my phone and I can see where he is and where he’s been. I can name each room in the house and assign him to vacuum specific rooms, or even specific parts of rooms. I can schedule him to vacuum every day right after breakfast if I want. He goes from carpeted to non-carpeted surfaces easily. He returns to his little house when he’s done cleaning and empties his collection of trash into a storage container.
He is not quiet, but he’s not as loud as a regular vacuum; you can still talk at a normal volume while he’s cleaning. But you can hear him; he’s not meant to be silent; I don’t think I would program him to clean in the middle of the night because I think he would wake me up. He once got stuck on the edge of a rug when it folded over on him, but we simply put a footstool on that rug the next time we cleaned and that prevented any further issues. He can be programmed to avoid stairways, and if I have laundry piles all over the bathroom floor I can simply program him to skip that room.
Lodged deep in my brain is a video I once saw of a robot vacuum spreading dog excrement all over someone’s house. So I think I would not leave Rocky to his own devices. (Not that we have a pet. Although I am still dreaming of Craig.) Right now, he’s still so novel and charming, Carla and I like to check on him occasionally while he works. I wonder if the novelty will eventually wear off, or if we will always continue to personify him and watch him fondly?
The only mild negative I have to say about Rocky is that he requires a home base. We’ve set him up in the kitchen, which I’m not a huge fan of; I like appliances, for the most part, to be out of sight. But I know that I will probably get used to his presence after a while, and if not, my husband promises we can move him to a less central location.
Rocky in his house.
If you have been dithering about getting a robot vacuum, I will add my voice to chorus of people who say I wish I hadn’t waited so long.
I know you are buzzing with the anxiety of knowing whether I completed my to-do list on Friday. Let me put you (temporarily) out of your misery: No, I did not.
But! I did accomplish parts of it.
I made the phone call and hopefully our late fee/credit card charge have been eliminated and we have not overpaid for a month of this utility service. Time will tell. (Just a note: it took me a good ten minutes to even find the phone number I needed to call; it is not online anywhere, I don’t think, and I had to search through bills in my email. Then I got an automated message that the wait time exceeded twenty minutes, so they could call me back, and I chose that option. Only to look perplexedly at my phone 45 minutes later to find that I HAD missed a call, but my phone chose to silence it as it had determined the call was probably spam. I did get through to a live human on my next call though, so all is well that ends well.)
While I posted photos of my supposedly daily walks, I did not go for a walk Friday or do any sort of exercise. (Wait a second. We did wander around a farmer’s market for awhile. And then Carla and I did go swimming Friday – the last swim of the season – and I did twelve laps of various poorly executed strokes. My watch said I burned 30 calories LOL.) Sigh. I did go for two delightful walks on Saturday though – a walk with a friend in the beautiful autumn woods, and then a flashlit walk with Carla and the puppy she was dog-sitting. Sunday, again no walk at all – WHY is it so challenging to get outside or on the treadmill for TEN MEASLY MINUTES? – but at least I did a strength training workout. Also, for the record, I am walking on the treadmill as I type this post.
Did I find a new eye doctor? No I did not. My eye doctor efforts included a) whining about eye doctors to my friend during our Saturday walk and b) whining about eye doctors to my parents on Sunday. My husband, who was on hand for the second bout of whining, did some research into potential eye doctors. He discovered that perhaps I have been unable to get in to see MY eye doctor because he may no longer work for our hospital system and discovered that one of the only eye doctors accepting new patients is an eye doctor I saw a dozen years ago and decided against seeing again.
I folded the clean laundry in the photo I posted Friday, plus a surprise load of clean laundry I’d left and completely forgotten about in the dryer, plus a load of darks. And I did manage to WASH three additional loads of laundry – four, if you count the reds that are in the washing machine as I type. One of those loads is now occupying the clean laundry basket so recently emptied; another is on my bed as fresh, clean bed linens; a third is in the dryer. There is still a load of mainly-black clothing on the floor of my bathroom but it will at least migrate to the washer today.
Finally, an unadulterated success: I DID make dinner Friday. I found a new recipe for barbecue pork, made it, and my husband liked it much better than he likes our old recipe. I like it fine, although it’s a little too vinegary. But that’s nothing a big slosh of barbecue sauce and sriracha won’t fix. Saturday I did not make dinner; I went out to lunch with my friend after our walk and it was amazing and there’s no way anything could top it, so my husband ate leftovers for dinner and I finished off the last of the previous weekend’s chili (do not tell your husband, Engie; although I did survive, so the gamble paid off). My parents made dinner Sunday and I’m really enjoying this not-making-dinner kick so let’s see how it goes.
Anyway, since so much of my weekend has been occupied by laundry, I am in the mood to talk about laundry. (This is the part where your misery amps back up.)
I am 99% sure that others in our blogging community have discussed this topic before, but blog topics, like laundry, are not meant to be addressed once and then never again. As I was dutifully whining and complaining about doing laundry, I was noticing some of the things I do and wondering how YOU do them in your house.
Collecting the Dirty Laundry:
We have three laundry hampers in our house. Carla has one in her closet, my husband and I have one in our closet for white clothing, and another one in our bathroom (a mere five feet from the closet hamper; it makes sense, I promise) for colors. When it’s time for laundry doing, which I probably do once a week unless I have a burst of There Is a Better Way to Do This Task, I sort the laundry into piles on my bathroom floor. Then I enlist Carla to sort her own clothing and add her piles to my piles.
Sorting:
The piles I sort laundry into are roughly: whites, white towels, towels (and swimsuits), darks, lights, blacks and reds, delicates, rags. Carla and my husband sometimes struggle with what belongs in the darks pile vs the lights pile, which indicates that I may be overly rigid in my definitions. Especially because it 100% doesn’t matter in any way; I think I could probably get away with washing even the reds and the whites together and they would be fine. Really the only reason I divide things into piles at all is because they have to be divided somehow – there is too much laundry to fit into one wash cycle – and it would offend my aesthetic sensibilities if they were all jumbled together helter-skelter.
The lights pile includes things like pale blues, light greys, light greens, yellows, khakis, light wash denim. The darks pile includes dark wash denim, navy, dark blues/greys/greens. The color my family wears by far the most often – and by “my family” I mainly mean me, but Carla does contribute a lot of pinks – is black, closely followed by things in the red family, which includes purple, burgundy, and orange. I wear black leggings nearly every day and a lot of my sleepwear (different leggings) is black as well. If, as I did this laundry cycle, I wait so long that we have enormous quantities of black and red clothing, I will separate them into two piles. Wow, this is boring, and yet I persist.
Getting the Piles into and out of the Laundry Room:
Usually I wait to sort laundry into piles until I have a good wave of laundry energy. But sometimes I will sort and then allow the piles to remain in our bathroom as some sort of avant-garde commentary on consumerism and laziness. I take each pile into the laundry room separately, loading the entire pile precariously into my arms. Do we have a (separate, dirty-clothes-only) laundry basket for just this purpose? Yes. Are the laundry hampers themselves on wheels? Yes, they are. Do I persist in hugging a giant pile of smelly laundry to my chest all the way to the washer, dripping socks and underwear whilst in danger of tripping over dangling sweater arms? Yes, yes I do. I am better about using the (clean clothing only) laundry basket to transport clean things from the laundry room to the folding space. But there is NO WAY to easily get the clean clothes into the laundry basket. Our dryer is stacked on top of our washer and I inevitably drop socks or underpants on the floor. And the laundry room is also our mud room, so this is probably not great, Bob, but I tend to look the other way.
Responsibility:
Probably 90% of the time, I’m the one doing the laundry. I sort it, get it into the washer, less frequently get it into the dryer, then haul it into my bedroom for “folding.” I say “folding” because I only fold some of the clothing. I do not fold my or Carla’s underclothes, because we both prefer a jumble of drawers in our drawers. (I do fold my sports bras though.) To recap a topic I have already covered quite thoroughly, I bundle my socks together, and gently fold over the very tops of my husband’s dress socks, and stack his athletic socks in a neatish pile. I throw Carla’s socks in a pile because she enjoys mismatched socks, although this strategy is not working as well anymore as it should; she has a whole drawer full of socks and still tells me nearly daily that she can’t find any socks; something must be done to resolve this. I fold everyone’s pants and pajama pants, my husband’s underwear, and all my leggings and workout clothing and pajamas.
I do not fold any of my husband’s shirts, as he prefers to do that himself. (Thank goodness, as I am TERRIBLE at folding. NOTHING is uniform.) I do not fold any of Carla’s shirts, as we have discovered that it works better for her to hang all her shirts in her closet rather than to stuff them into her dresser where they will never be seen again. Instead of folding, I lay everything out neatly – my husband’s stuff on his side of the bed, mine on my side (although I usually put my things away as I go), and Carla’s on the bench at the foot of our bed. My husband is then responsible for folding his shirts/putting his clothing away. Carla is ostensibly responsible for putting her clothing away, but it is more often than not sitting on the bench in my bedroom for weeks at a time.
Things like rags, dish towels, and bath mats have somehow become my sole responsibility. I do not know if they would ever make it into the wash if I didn’t wash them. Do my family members know they require washing? Hmm. Perhaps I need to follow up on this one.
My husband takes sole responsibility for washing his dress shirts. They require additional attention, apparently, so I just stay out of it. Luckily, he owns more dress shirts than a J. Crew store, so he only washes them rarely.
Historical Precedents:
I don’t know why we fold laundry on our bed. Maybe because it is technically closest to the laundry room? Or maybe because it makes it very simple for me to put my things away immediately? At our old house, laundry folding took place on the guest room bed. That made it all too easy to ignore the laundry for eons, so I think I prefer this setup, where we have to deal with it before we go to bed.
When I was growing up, I have no recollection of where the laundry was folded. Perhaps in the laundry room, and then stacked on the ironing board? Perhaps on my parents’ bed? My mom did a load of ironing every weekend, and that took place in the laundry room or in the living room. I do not iron, so that’s not really a thing in our house. The only ironing board we own is a tiny dorm-size one that must have belonged to my husband in college.
Sometimes I will fold rags or towels in the living room in front of the TV, or dump rags in a pile on the ottoman for Carla to fold while she watches TV.
Carla knows how to do laundry, and sometimes helps. I did my own laundry from the time I was in middle school, and in fact used to iron my own jeans. Perhaps this is why I have such an aversion to ironing as an adult. Not that anyone was forcing me or even recommending that I iron my own jeans as a middle schooler, mind you.
My husband also knows how to do laundry, and does it better and more efficiently – thank you to my mother-in-law – and we used to do laundry together in our college laundry room, when it was mildly scandalous to launder our underthings in the same room, a time I look on fondly. By “better” I mean that he is more thoughtful about things like temperature and heat settings. I pretty much wash everything in cold and dry it all on regular, but he’ll wash towels in hot and dry them on the towel setting, things like that. (I wash rags in the sanitizing cycle, and throw both Oxy and vinegar in with the regular laundry soap.)
Laundry Approaches:
My husband and I have some very different approaches to laundry. One is towels. I like to run towels separately from clothing, because I feel like they take longer to dry and also they displace more fuzz than normal clothes and also because they are towels and clothing is clothing. My husband is fine washing his white undershirts and socks with his white towels. I say, to each his own.
He is also a bit more strict about volume. I figure, if my washer claims it can handle a king size comforter, then I can usually get all of our black and red clothing to fit in one load. I do have limits. But he is much more wary of overcrowding.
The other major differentiation between us is something I have written about all-capsily before; in this house, we do not have a towel for any purpose in the laundry room, even though our current washing machine is also a front loader.
Shifting Values:
My position on bleach has changed over the years. When I was a kid, we had well water instead of city water, so we didn’t really own any white clothing. But any white clothing we did have required bleach to maintain its purity. For years after I moved out of my childhood home, I continued to bleach our white clothing. But in the past six? ten? years or so, I have moved away from bleach. I make liberal use of Oxy Clean, especially with our white bedding and my husband’s white clothing and towels, and I haven’t noticed any degradation in color.
We also used to use liquid fabric softener, but the washer in my current house does not drain the liquid fabric softener properly, so we have moved to dryer sheets. I’ve tried dryer balls exclusively, but those don’t work as well as the sheets. I do forget to add sheets a good amount of the time. Shhhh – don’t tell my husband.
Laundry Problems:
By far my biggest laundry problem is forgetting to move things from the washer to the dryer, and then needed to re-run them with vinegar and Oxy to get rid of the inevitable mildew smell. That has been a problem ever since I moved into my own house and out of a dorm room/apartment with a shared laundry space. But. Now there is another laundry problem. One that also necessitates re-washing entire loads of laundry.
Why yes. That IS dog food. Carla apparently stores dog food in her pockets and then forgets to empty her pockets before she puts her clothes in the laundry. And then I forget to check her pockets before I run the laundry. The dog food gets all mushy and coats the entire load of laundry in Eau de Dog Food, so there is no choice but to run it again with a stiff dose of Oxy and vinegar.
For those who observe Yom Kippur, I hope the holiday has been meaningful for you. For those who observe Canadian Thanksgiving, I hope the day is full of good food and empty of drama.
