Laundry whoa

I went to bed last night way after midnight and then a text message woke me at 6:24 AM.  Because of that text message, I had to work from 9 AM to 5 PM today . . . and then my usual shift from 9 PM to midnight. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s eleven hours of work.

And then, because we have a meeting with a teacher at 8:30 AM tomorrow, my daughter and I spent two hours organizing her schoolwork and preparing.

I consoled myself with the reminder that I only have seven more years until my youngest child is done with school.  That’s really not all that comforting, but considering I’ve been parenting school-aged kids for fifteen years so far, that seemed some consolation. Just how much longer will I have to know how to divide fractions and how to recognize a direct object or subject complement?

Seven years will pass in the blink of an eye, right?  The only problem is that in seven years I’d prefer to be about . . . oh, say 35, but instead I’ll be approaching sixty.  Why can’t the kids grow up and leave me the same age?

Anyway, the main excitement in my life today involved the arrival of the dryer vent guy, a super nice man who told me he’s been married for twenty years–and we exclaimed over how quickly the years pass.  He and his team used drills and tubing and, for all I know, sorcery to clean out the dryer lint lurking in my walls.

When this house was built, some genius thought it was a good idea for the dryer vent to go up through the wall, then around a corner, then across the span of the garage, then around another corner and then finally, out of the house.  Everyone knows that a dryer vent is supposed to be straight so that the dryer lint doesn’t accumulate, right?

Anyway, so I was mortified when I saw the clumps of lint–a veritable blizzard of dryer lint–piling up under the outside vent.  Pure shame, as if I were the idiot who designed the flawed system.  You practically needed a shovel to scoop it up–but they used a vacuum cleaner.

So, let the laundry resume.

Hooray.