Laundry room politics

Maybe it was because I started when she walked in. 

Art lessons tend to throw my schedule for helping Demeter into some disarray, because I prefer to get her laundry done in the morning.  This time, it was late afternoon, when I seized the opportunity of an empty laundry room, and raced down.  It was also a warm day, and seeing no one, I slipped off my mask, as I sorted the hot, dry clothes and bedding out of the dryer.

The door swung open, and in strode a young-ish woman with ivory skin, and a shingle of unnatural red hair.  She looked questioningly at me, and I assured her that I was almost finished and added that I was fully vaccinated, slipping my mask back on.

"Do you live here?" she inquired.  The tone was reasonably conversational and was shaded by a slight accent that I couldn't place -- not quite British...perhaps South African? 

I explained that my mother had had a fall a few months ago, and that I did her laundry and meals.  In my mother's building, this information is usually enough to identify me; the residents of the condo  know about my mother's accident of seven months ago.

However, the woman persisted, still very politely:  "And does your mother own one of the condos?"

That's when I realised.  She thinks I've snuck in to use the machines.

I'm not quite sure why the idea of illicit laundry-room users is so prevalent, but it is.  I've never encountered any myself.  Years ago, when I was a relatively newly-wed living in a condo, my sister got cornered by the resident dragon lady, for the crime of doing my laundry as a favour.  I know it is a persistent fear in our current building.

I steadily replied to my gentle but firm challenger that my mother was one of the very first owners in the building.  We exchanged a couple of pleasantries, before I retreated to Demeter's unit to tell her the story.

Demeter told me that the accent I couldn't place is probably Kenyan.  A woman who attended Demeter's high school in Nairobi (many years after Demeter graduated, of course) moved into the building about two years ago.  

I'll address her by name the next time I see her.  That should startle her.

Hung out to dry

Do you know how today is supposed to be Blue Monday? (Experts don't think it is, by the way.)

Well, yesterday was pretty discouraging.

It actually started over the Christmas holidays.

One of the requirements we gave to our realtor when searching for a condo last spring was an in-suite laundry.  The apartment had one laundry room with two washers and two dryers, shared by 35 units.  In addition, it was expensive: $2.50 for a washing load (more if you wanted warm or hot water); $2.25 for an hour's drying - 25¢ for each additional eight minutes.

After a couple of decades of my own machines, working out how not to piss people off was a challenge.  They certainly pissed me off: students who stuffed everything into the machines together -- cushions, duvets, underwear -- and people who failed to clear out the machine, but were enraged if you cleared their stuff out in desperation.

The siren call of "home" when I first saw this condo loosened my resolve. The laundry rooms were an odd set-up: three tiny laundry-rooms with a washer and dryer each, on the third, fourth, and fifth floors. (We're on the second floor.) Fifty cents per use, so a dollar for one load.

The machines are older, and don't show how much time is remaining, so I leave a post-it note saying when I turned the machine on.

I've been hoping to start a trend. Nuthin' doing, but I found the sharing civil enough.

Until three or four weeks ago, when, on two occasions, I found an unoccupied laundry room, put in my laundry, set the timer on my phone to return promptly, left a note saying when I'd started the washer ----- and returned to find someone had poached the dryer while my clothes were in the washing machine. I thought this was a thoughtless and unneighbourly thing to do, and left another post-it note saying so, before searching the building for a free dryer. (And no, I didn't poach it from another user.)

In the month that has passed, I felt I had got over my indignation, and no more poaching seemed to occur. To me, anyway.

Yesterday, I decided to put a load of towels in. I only dare do the towels every two or three weeks, but it had been a few weeks since the last contretemps, so I was feeling brave. On the fourth floor, where the best dryer is, the dryer was in use, but warm to the touch, which usually means it's getting toward the end of the set time, which is one hour. The washer takes a half hour, and when I returned, the dryer was still. It was full of towels. I carefully draped these -- about five bathsheets and half a dozen smaller sizes, over the rack, carefully separating one not-quite-dry towel to a separate rung, so it wouldn't dampen the dry items, and would have a better chance to air out. I put my towels into the dryer, started the machine, and left my usual post-it note, noting the time and date.

The Resident Fan Boy, back from a voice lesson with younger daughter, accompanied me for the "half-hour check", where we remove dry items so the rest has a fighting chance. To our horror, there was another post-it note beside mine, scrawled with large and angry writing. I had apparently used the two quarters left in the coin-cradle by the previous user, who had intended to run the towels through a second cycle, and thought leaving the coins would be a clear signal of his/her intentions.

H/she hadn't reckoned with my mind. I had been surprised, when I had gone to put my money in, to find 50¢ already there, but figured, knowing myself, that I had put them in place without knowing.

NOT VERY FRIENDLY!! bellowed the post-it note. The towels I'd draped over the rack were gone.

I grabbed another post-it note and scribbled: "Absolutely unintentional! I'm sorry! I've left two quarters -- if you come back!" And thought to myself: Really? Leaving two quarters in the slots holds your place? Really? Using two hour-long drying cycles when someone else is in the queue?

I didn't write that, of course. It would use too many post-it notes, aside from enraging whoever-this-is further.

Both the RFB and elder daughter are sure the interloper is the same person whom I admonished by post-it note at Christmas.

I rather hope they're right. These are three incidents, and I hate the idea of three households waiting to ambush me with baseball bats, but that's a little extreme.

Isn't it?

A moment's paws

When I look at older pictures of family and friends, I find myself peering at the backgrounds:  kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms.  Odd memories are triggered by the sight of long disappeared place-mats or floor tiles.

It occurred to me a few weeks back that there are little details about this apartment building that will vanish from my memory -- unless I do something about it.

So I snapped this photo of the doorstop in the laundry-room downstairs.  There's probably some story about it that I'll never know.

Drip dry

I'm gonna wash that man right out of my basket

"As the first day of the year goes, so goes the year," intoned my husband, as we trudged down through horizontal snowfall to the bus stop. I got really worried about this ten minutes later, as I stood blinking back tears, gazing into the window of one of the neighbourhood's recently bankrupted coffee shops, wondering why I persist in leaving the travel planning to him. A bus eventually showed up and we made it to Atonement on time, our choice for this year's New Year film. Therefore, I am refraining from doing the Resident Fan Boy's laundry today, as he has just told me that there is a superstition which holds that washing someone's clothes on New Year's Day will wash that person out of your life. Which means, I guess, that you should offer to do laundry for your bêtes noirs today.


This has been the sort of Christmas that Ottawans like to imagine is typical of their Christmas. Less than half of our eight (oh gawd, 8?) Christmases here have been white; the rest have been grey, kind of khaki, and usually icy. The Resident Fan Boy and I made our way through the streets from the movie, there being little bus service on this eighth day of Christmas. I cursed myself for failing to bring my camera as we waded down a deserted Sparks Street where a quartet of naked black statues gamboled in the swirling flakes, past the nearly whited-out tomb of the Unknown Soldier, by Laura Secord standing forlornly like the little match girl, only far better clad in her empire-line coat and bonnet. Story-book flakes continued to dance down on tobogganers at McDonald Gardens Park ("If we were half-decent parents," I remarked, "we'd be taking our children tobogganing instead of pissing off to movies.") and people with the countenances of pilgrims parading down Charlotte and over the St Patrick's bridge, shouldering snowshoes, cross-country-skiing paraphernalia, or snowboards.

Atonement, all in all, seems a splendid way to start the new year. I think the Resident Fan Boy found it a tad depressing, but I'm with Stephan Moffat who has Sally Sparrow in his Doctor Who episode Blink declare: "Sad is happy for deep people." Moffat may be full of it, for all I know, but sad good art doesn't depress me, while bad art invariably does, no matter how upbeat.

Anyway, Atonement: splendid cinematography; Keira Knightly acting like Helena Bonham Carter for the first half, and Winona Ryder for the second; five glorious minutes of Vanessa Redgrave; and a plot which, despite zigzagging back and forth (which would drive my mother wild), is enthralling and plausible --- except for one bit and by the end of the movie, you know why this is so. Oh yes, and I'm not sure what James McAvoy's character would be doing deep in the war and ready to be evacuated from Dunkirk four years after the initial events which are supposed to have occurred in 1935. Not-so-upbeat artistic license, perhaps?