Surprise! I'm a single parent

Friday night and it’s raining and raining and raining. It’s kind of nice. I’ve a polar fleece blanket over my knees with my ten year old fluffy slippers over my socks. Outside the water on the roof is funneling through the functional spouting system until it meets the big gaps where the down pipe connection should be. At this point it forms an artful cascade and make a noise that maybe sounds like a running urinal but I prefer to think of as ‘water feature’. If the rain is hard I don’t hear my water feature – just drumming on the roof – but as it slacks off the pipeless sound effects begin and do you know what they signal?

That sound means I don’t need to be getting started with Friday night laundry loads because the environmental dryer will not be operation tomorrow. Well OK maybe there will be some wind but there’s also likely to be a whole lot of wet to go with it. So I can blog and play games online and not feel the least bit guilty.

Friday night washing has been a feature of my life for the eleven years Ive been a working Mum. I try and get it started and done as early in the weekend as I can on the theory that then Im free to do other things. Im sure the people who have rented the house next door over the past decade think they live next to a crazy woman since Ive been known to get out there at midnight on friday night to hang out my washing but hey – its fabulous to be lying in bed on Saturday morning knowing my washing is already getting dry.

Sorting washing is the thing I just hate. Ok I also hate loads of postage stamp small items from my little girls – winter means at least 14 sets of socks and 14 knickers and a good helping of singlets and so on to get on and off the line.  I try and pair them as I peg so I don’t have the tedium of pairing from the basket. Gee you just don’t want to know the way I orgainse my washing line in a per person per row sort of way to try and minimise the horror of facing Mount Laundry at the end of the weekend.

However this weekend all washing looks like its off.   Good thing too.