i'm back and my clothes are clean

Count Don among the multitudes offended that I haven't been posting here. "Why haven't you AP'ed?" he asked me in an aggrieved tone a few days ago. He knows the answer very well, of course: this happened, sending me winging off to Washington for two weeks, and then this was released, causing much household excitement, and of course this is coming up, meaning I've got a lot of stuff to do. "You could do it yourself, you know," I said. "You know the passwords."

He rolled his eyes. "I don't want to blog," he said. "I want to be blogged about."

Well then. In the interest of maintaining his Internet celebrity status, allow me to give you the big, huge, incredibly exciting update:


We have a washer and dryer. And they work! When I got back from Washington, Don met me at the airport with flowers, took me out to dinner, and then whisked me out the next morning for a full day of shopping with no complaining on his part (I know, he's awesome). In addition to ogling jewelry and watches we would never buy, trying on strange clothing items, and buying some long-awaited new shoes for him, we also managed to (finally!) agree on and purchase a washer and dryer. Don and his dad had actually finished with all of the necessary plumbing before I left, although I didn't expect him to be willing to buy anything yet. But lo, Sears was having a sale, and they had the models I wanted, and there we were. So, rather than spending three hundred dollars each (!) on platforms to raise the machines up to the level we liked, Don spent the week before the delivery building a serviceable platform that cost nothing, as we had all the appropriate lumber around from working on the floors. We will eventually replace it with something sleek and fabulous (and maybe with storage) when we re-do the mudroom, but for now it -- and the temporary plywood floor, and the bare walls -- will do.

We've decided to open the mudroom up and make it part of the kitchen, giving us better flow and a little more space. This means that mudroom renovations, for now, went just to the point of getting the laundry facilities in place and functional, and all the rest will wait until we undertake the big kitchen renovation. The machines were delivered last weekend, and I've spent the last week washing anything and everything made of fabric in the house, up to and including the cat.

Okay, maybe not the cat.