So I have really only been wearing work clothes during the week. This means that I will generally only wear two shirts and two pairs of pants during any given week. At home I wear pajamas. So I rarely have a full load of darks to wash, as Kenn mostly wears lighter colored dress shirts and khakis to work. So I have been hand-washing my shirts for a few weeks now. Well, it didn't make sense to pay to wash the pants in the apartment complex's laundry facilities since it was only two pairs. So I washed all of my clothes in the sink. The pants were a bad idea. There is too much effort involved in the rinsing of such bulky items in the sink. It is difficult to really get all of the suds out of the pants. The time and effort involved in such an execution are worth the two bucks that I felt I had been wasting-- especially since I have no guarantee that I will not be using a hair-dryer on the pants tomorrow in order to get them dry enough to iron.

The wringing out of the pants was also difficult. Unlike shirts, there is so much length to the pants that there is no place to put what is not being wrung(?)out to keep it out of the way so that the pants are neither dropped nor re-soddened.

I knew that before the advent of the most modern washing machines, laundry had remained a large chore, and before the use of any automatic washing machine or even ringer washers, laundry was a terribly unbearable task. But I'm glad that I only generally hand-wash and air dry delicates and a few work shirts.

Luckily, I have not taken to running a clothesline in the backyard-- in this weather, I'd end up with freeze-dried clothes, like in the Little House series. Or, worse yet, the constant rain would leave me with mildewed garments.

All that to say this: I am glad that I am able to hand wash clothing if necessary. However, I am so very grateful for the technological advances that make it a mostly hands-off job.