Unwinding with a Catalogue

It's Monday night.

After a half dozen escape attempts, your toddler is finally sleeping soundly (albeit upside-down) in her bed. Your seven-week-old has just nodded off in her swing.  You've survived another day that included a tantrum in the cracker aisle at the supermarket, sore arms from rocking a fussy baby for four continuous hours, and a leaky pipe that required your plumber to take a sledge-hammer to the living room wall you recently spent thousands of dollars to paint.  And despite all that, you were still able to prepare a nutritious dinner for your family, even if the salmon was a tad charred and the quinoa a bit soggy.  You kick up your feet eager to indulge in the treat that arrived in the mail this afternoon: The Williams-Sonoma catalogue.

Pictured on the cover is the latest iteration of the iconic Kitchen-Aid mixer.  Like a Louis Vuitton bag it is something you must own eventually, even if you don't bake and wouldn't know the first thing to do with a dough hook.  The mixer comes in French blue and looks good on a counter; that's really all that matters.

On page 11 there is a suggested menu for a wine-tasting party.  You turn to your husband.  "We should host a wine-tasting party," you say.  "Sounds expensive," he replies.

Page 35 features several font options from which to choose for sets of monogrammed linen napkins.  You wish you had the disposable income for monogrammed linen napkins.  For now, it's paper napkins bought in bulk from BJ's for you.

On page 48 a picture-perfect stack of skull-shaped pancakes dressed in maple syrup and walnuts seems to mock you.  You do not have room in your ugly blue kitchen to store skull-shaped pancake molds and, therefore, will almost certainly never make skull-shaped pancakes for your children on Halloween morning.  You're starting to feel pretty crumby about that.

Before long you are accelerating down the self-deprecating spiral.  Two smiling girls on the following page are eating homemade organic whole wheat waffles off immaculate white plates resting on a reclaimed-wood kitchen table that also contains bowls of plump mixed berries, sliced apples, and a vase of fresh-cut flowers.  Breakfast at your house is cereal eaten out of (BPA-free) plastic bowls off an Ikea table that also contains a weeks' worth of mail and last weekend's New York Times.  On page 55 a child using a citrus press to make a single glass of orange juice makes you feel guilty for not serving fresh-squeezed juice to your children, even though you don't allow your children to drink juice because of the sugar content.  The gleaming espresso machines on pages 64-67 make you wish you knew how to make your own lattes, instead of spending $50 a month (according to your last credit card statement) at Starbucks.  Perhaps this is why you can't afford sets of monogrammed linen napkins.

Because of the braised ribs simmering in a slow-cooker pictured on page 70, you experience pangs of remorse that, due to its inconvenient location at the back of the cabinet above the refrigerator, you've hardly used the Crock-Pot you registered for when you got married.  The pictures of autumn wreathes on pages 98-99 remind you that fall is coming and you should probably think about how you're going to decorate the house, because you can already tell that this is the type of neighborhood where neighbors compete to have the best-looking seasonal house on the block.  The picture of the Miele rotary iron on page 104 reminds you that you should probably iron the stack of khakis in the laundry room so that your husband has more than one pair to choose from this Labor Day weekend.

And you're spent.  You decide to leave the Pottery Barn catalogue, waiting on the coffee table, for another night.

Laundry Dreams (And Nightmares)

One of the best things about buying a house, in my estimation, is finally having a private laundry room.  After four years of renting in buildings with shared laundry facilities and dealing with all sorts of laundry drama, I’ve been dreaming of carrying baskets of laundry to the basement whenever I am so inclined, dumping them into the washer, and enjoying the rhythmic hum of the machine as I move on to other household tasks.  No waiting for an open washer because, despite the notices posted in both English and Spanish prohibiting the use of more than three washers at a time, a neighbor’s housekeeper is occupying all seven washers and three dryers.  No racing down four flights of stairs before some neighbor who just carried an oozing bag of garbage to the trash hut removes my freshly cleaned clothes from the washer and dumps them on top of the machine.  No worrying about someone stealing my sheets and towels out of the dryer (that happened), having to comfort a neighbor’s housekeeper who was just fired from her position (that happened), or getting stuck in an elevator for a half hour on my way to the laundry room (yup, that too).

We knew when we bought this house that the appliances were ancient.  I mean, the dryer was manufactured by RCA.  Are they even around anymore?  But the sellers certified in the contract that all systems and appliances in the home were in “working condition,” so we were hoping to get away with not having to buy a new appliance until our bank account balance is restored.

The night before I planned to do my first load of laundry in the new house, I went down to the yucky laundry room in the yucky basement and ran a cup of bleach through the yucky washing machine.  No morning-after disasters resulted from this experiment.  The hose didn’t leak, the laundry room didn’t flood, and the washing machine smelled a lot cleaner.  I put in my first sorted load, closed the door, turned the knob, and prayed for the best.  Forty minutes later, our clothes were damp and smelled clean.  Success!  Time to transfer them to the dryer.  I opened the door to the dryer and WHAT… THE… F?!

“You’ll never guess what I just found in the dryer,” I texted to my husband, who by now is accustomed to receiving various S.O.S. messages from home while at work. 

“A mouse?”

It was a reasonable guess.  Although we haven’t found any evidence to date, I’m quite certain there is a colony of mice living above the drop ceiling, because that’s the kind of basement we have and, also, that's the kind of luck we have.

“Worse,” I replied.  “A load of laundry the sellers left behind.”

“Gross!”

It was gross.  Those clothes have been sitting in the dryer for at least one month since we’ve closed!

The idea of leaving behind an entire load of laundry in a move absolutely baffles me.  If I so much as lose a baby sock in the midst of doing wash I am bent out of shape for a week.

I didn’t know what to do.  I am skittish about touching other people’s laundry, even if it’s clean.  I mean, who wants to touch someone else’s granny panties?  So I put on a pair of latex gloves and put the forgotten clothes into a black trash bag.  The clothes were dry, but smelled damp.  I put the trash bag in the laundry room closet, but immediately felt guilty.  Should I fold them? I wondered.  No, I decided, that would be creepy.  I loaded my clothes into the dryer, set it for an hour, and called the seller’s agent to arrange a pick-up time with the sellers.

An hour later, when I went down to retrieve my laundry, it was still damp.  I guess it needs more time, I reasoned, and reset the dryer.  Another hour later the clothes were still damp and I realized that although the dryer’s motor was running, it was not emitting any heat. 

“Dryer’s busted,” I texted my husband.

“But I thought you found dry clothes in there.”

“Yes, but remember, they've been sitting in there for over a month.”

Of course the busted dryer meant that my dream of doing laundry on a whim had been placed on hold.  Two days later, I loaded two bags of laundry into the Jeep and carted them to my in-laws'.

This past weekend, we made an unplanned visit to P.C. Richard to purchase a new dryer and, hell, while we’re at it, we might as well buy a washer, as well.  Our brand-spanking-new, state-of-the-art, top-rated, glass-top Samsung washer and dryer were delivered this week.  They look a little out-of place in our yucky laundry room in our yucky basement (I was actually embarrassed when the delivery men arrived to install them), but aren’t they gorgeous?  It turns out laundry dreams really do come true!