The One Thing

So far our move to the Irvington neighborhood in NE Portland has been the most fabulous thing ever — there are cool houses everywhere in all different styles with interesting gardens and landscaping to give us an aesthetic walking experience, a Whole Foods, a Trader Joe’s, a Co-op, AND a specialty cheese shop all within walking distance, the best wood fired pizza place in the world, a fab burrito place that uses that elusive tasty white cheese that I can’t seem to find in the shops anywhere but that makes me so happy, a Thai place with the greatest thom yum soup that will cure all of your ills and make you smarter, lots of parks for strolling, and so much more! It is all rainbows and kittens here. I expect cherubs to start feeding me grapes any minute. There is just one thing…

… NO laundry. There are laundry hook ups in the basement, but no actual machines and lots of other high priority things (like unpacking and waiting for the cherubs) that need to be done before even thinking about figuring out the logistics of getting them.

At first I thought, no big deal, we’ll just pop by the local laundromat, throw in a load now and then, do some reading while we wait. I’m always looking for a good excuse to do nothing but read.

After two weeks, we’d managed to dirty every item of clothing in the house. It was time. I googled laundry, laundromat, etc.

And discovered that there is no laundromat in our neighborhood. Stories abounded online of other people hunting for a place to get their dirty duds clean and discovering that all of the laundromats had been shut down.

There weren’t any even slightly close by our house. I was not yet daunted. I knew there was one in our old neighborhood that we’d walked by, so we just headed back over to NW Portland with our giant suitcase and two enormous bags full of clothes. It was just a little further than we’d planned on going, but I’d still have time to sit back and read my book and life was good.

Except.

1) We forgot the soap

2) We quickly ran out of money (twice)

3) We’d forgotten about the crazy people who hang out at laundromats

This quickly put a crimp in my laundry lounging/reading plans. The species of crazy person at this particular laundry mat was of the Crazy Man variety — a tenacious type of crazy being who seems to multiply much like when one chops the head off of a Hydra and two more appear. Not that we chopped anything off of anyone, but when Crazy Man Counting and Obsessively Recounting His Money left, he was replaced by not one, but two Staring Men. First it was just one Staring Man — he sat directly across from me in the laundromat and was soon joined by Staring Man #2.

You can see the problem here? No way was Barrett going to leave me alone with the Crazy Men to read quietly. So when we discovered we had no soap, who ran blocks and blocks to the co-op? Me. When we ran out of money (twice) who ran down to the ATM? Me. EVEN WHEN I WAS AT A REALLY GOOD PART IN MY BOOK. **sigh**

Trying to figure out where to get a good deal on a washing machine and how to get it to our house is starting to look like a better and better idea.

Because the cherubs definitely won’t come if we’re wearing dirty clothes.

Bridget