NO TIME

It’s been a while since I posted and you can thank blame Yom Tov, mainly. Well, Shabbos- yom tov-Shabbos-yom tov-Shabbos-yom tov-Shabbos, to be precise. I was cooking and baking like a fiend. And then catching up on the backlog of patients, and then on the backlog of paperwork that this creates. And then. AND THEN. My housekeeper couldn’t come because her husband is sick. So for the next week or two my life will suck. It’s no wonder there are so few women who have made their mark on history! It’s because they can’t get out of the bloody kitchen and laundry.

Yeah, yeah, tell me how my husband and 2 visiting sons should be doing all this alongside me, like a Soviet revolutionary poster minus the hammers and sickles. But they are used to a magic fairy housekeeper who keeps things spotless with a wave of her shmatteh and solvent spray. Still, it is kind of sweet to witness my husband’s pathetic attempts to help. ‘Where is the on button for the washing machine? What’s this hole for? The detergent? Where’s that?’ etc.

I can do all this stuff when I have to but I really dislike ironing. Well, in actual fact, I don’t mind all aspects of laundry compared to, say, cleaning toilets. But ironing is particularly frustrating in that, if you get the setting wrong, you either singe the shirt or it looks like you ironed it with a cabbage for all the difference made to the creases. At least I don’t leave bits of melted black gunge on the shirts like I used to  (like my kids do) after destroying the sole-plate of the iron by nuking some synthetic fabric.

But sooner or later I am screaming at the iron, (as I do all malevolent inanimate objects, refer to previous posts) because there’s one thing worse than not ironing out a crease; it’s ironing IN a crease. There’s something in the shirt that trips up the iron and bang, a concertina. But in between my raving and cursing and insane muttering, I ironed 8 white shirts in about 20 minutes yesterday (Sunday) (after cleaning up after the family brunch and getting very cross with some grandchildren who, under my trusting and patchy supervision, had managed to turn a collage-crafting session into a fingerpainting-with-PVA-glue session. But I digress.).

And there is a feeling of quiet triumph surveying these now-docile shirts on their hangers. But the next lot, I’m taking to the damn dry cleaner.