The Cavalry Shows Up

Ex-pat living…

I get asked often, “Are you on holiday?” (Makes sense, I talk funny).

I often ask, “Excuse me, what did you say?”

The one area I did not expect to struggle in was the laundry. I know how to do laundry. My Loving Spouse will tell you what a great job I do, doing the laundry. For 50 years, I’ve put the clothes in the machine, picked the cycle, put the detergent in and started the wash.

The first time I washed in Scotland, we thought the machine was malfunctioning. It went on for 2 1/2 hours! What kind of a wash cycle is that?

Our machine has an ECO cycle. It runs for 3 hours. You run your machine at night, and then hang it out in the morning. Except…often my laundry was still really wet. I was so very careful not to overload my small front loading H-WASH 500. Still my big fluffy bath sheets were not that fluffy anymore. I needed help.

Every month or so there are two sweet gals from church who ask me for coffee and bake us a loaf of gingerbread. I told them my washing woes.

They asked me hard questions like “what spin do you use?”

I had a pretty snappy comeback. “Hun?”

I told them the detergent blob I was using. They said, “Aye, that’s no good.”

“I think I need a tutorial. Come for coffee?” I asked.

The Laundry Cavalry was on their way, complete with the proper detergent, softener and fresh ginger bread.

Never having a front loader, how would I have known that you can change the temperature of the water and the rate of the spins. Eco was set too low to spin out the water, (besides I am not sold on anything that takes 3 hours).

Even the Laundry Cavalry needed a bit of research on this fancy machine.

Additionally, I was ‘under loading’ the machine. Spending most of my life in the land of Fahrenheit and pounds. 9kg means nothing to me. Apparently in washing machine language it means almost 20 pounds, as in a whole lot of dirty laundry.

We figured out a reasonable setting. It’s called “all-in”, runs for 59 minutes. I keep the cold water at 40 and spin the heck out of H-500 at 1400. With my new Fairy soap, everything thing is sweet and clean and fluffy.

We then had coffee and American blondies and talked about coats. This lead to us talking about sweaters. I showed them the one I had my eye on.

They thought it was ‘Bonnie’ and said, I should order the red one. Obviously, their wisdom has worked pretty well for me so far….

and so I did….and I am blessed.