March Challenge -- Day 19

Day 19 --What is your favorite or lucky number?

 

7, because I once won a prize at a classmate's birthday party by guessing it. I've stuck with it ever since.

Play the March Challenge along with Kwizgiver.

WWW.WEDNESDAY

To play along, just answer the following three questions ...

• What are you currently reading? After Visiting Friends by Michael Haney. It's a pleasure to read this memoir by a journalist who is following in the footsteps of his father, a Chicago newspaperman who died at age 35 "after visiting friends." The family legend and the published obit just don't make sense to the author and he's on a quest to find out what really happened to the father he lost when he was just six. It's well written and moving and filled with details about Chicago that I recognize and that warm my heart.

 

• What did you recently finish reading? Top Down by Jim Lehrer. I really didn't like this book very much, whichis surprising because so much emotion is inherently part of the story. It's about a fictional Secret Service agent who made the decision on 11/22/63 -- the plastic bubble top stays down and President Kennedy rides through Dallas in a completely open car. Except that decision wasn't really that fateful, since the bubble top wasn't bullet proof and all the dialog is stilted and few of the characters made any real sense to me. This from a reporter who covered JFK's arrival in Dallas and went on to become half of the world-famous MacNeil/Lehrer Report! I was very disappointed.

• What do you think you’ll read next? The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O'Brien. A novel about a pair of Irish schoolgirls set in the 1940s. I began it a couple weeks ago and was enjoying it. I'll return to it after After Visiting Friends.

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Adventures in Laundry

I give laundry way too much thought. I hate it, but it's my domestic obsession.

This latest episode began Sunday afternoon. I went down to our shared laundry room (two washers, two dryers) and discovered one of the dryers OOO. When I went to the use the other one, I found the coin slot jammed, leaving this one unusable, as well. AARGH!

So I had to put on makeup and real shoes and drag two loads of damp clothes to the washeteria several blocks up the street. Oh, Joy!

I decided to treat myself to a hot dog and fries from my favorite hot dog stand and was faced with more disappointment. They're closed on Sunday during winter. WINTER? Since when is St. Patrick's Day weekend winter? Since there's a chance of snow in the forecast every day, I guess.

So I went to the premium petstore. If I couldn't get junk food for myself, maybe I could get something super high quality and nutritious for Charlotte. I found a new canned food -- rabbit in gravy. Now I felt bad for Peter Cottontail, but I got over it because the food in the cats' bowls has to appeal to them, not to me. I got home and enthusiastically spooned it out for dinner, splashing myself with rabbit gravy in the process.

Anyone know how to remove rabbit gravy from my favorite sweatshirt?

I do! I do!

I kept the stained areas damp -- first with Shout! stain remover and then with shampoo. The coin slot on one of the dryers was finally repaired and last night I was able to wash it. Twice (once with socks and once with my cotton panties), warm water, each time with detergent and a booster.

My sweatshirt is at least 10 years old but it looks good as new.

Now I'm fixating on what I'll do this weekend if we're still down to one dryer. How many loads will I be able to do? What can I put off for another week? (I'm thinking the towels. I like drying them separately, without fabric softener sheets to hamper their absorbency.)