Yet Another Use for 100 Feet of Internet Cable

Alternative role for the moose-cutting, goose singeing spot:
a place to hang the laundry out of dog reach.

Yesterday, I volunteered to do the family washing. Armed with a book and enough change in a sock to do an inner-city mugging, old school style, I perched on the back of the four-wheeler surrounded by several trash bags stuffed full of laundry. Not even the loss of water pressure three-quarters of the way through the cycles slowed me down*. But, because the day was hot and sunny and the washeteria driers, like Laundromat driers the world over, have barely enough heat to dry tulle, I opted for the numerous clotheslines I had noticed strung among the trees at home.

Directly after hanging the second pair of jeans, I experienced a laundry malfunction. First one line broke, then the next, followed by a third and a fourth, dumping all the clothes on the ground. An inspection of the clothesline revealed it to be some kind of friable white plastic cord that had totally deteriorated in the sunlight and winter weather.

A forage of this house and the SO’s house-under-construction next door turned up no rope or rope substitute whatsoever. No wire, no phone cord, no extension cords, nothing.

I thought briefly of the brand-spanking new 100 feet of computer cable I just got in – but more than the fact that I needed the cable to hook up computers, I was just too lazy to walk back down to the office to get that or anything else that might work as clothesline.

So, I festooned the yard with duds. Since the family dog has a penchant for snitching (and chewing) shoes, towels and anything else that catches its fancy, I made sure that the sock racks (a.k.a. the saw horses) were up high off the ground. It worked. The dog only succeeded in making off with one towel that it was able to snag from one of the poles.

And while I managed just fine and made do with what I had and made lemonade out of lemons and did all those things that those annoying inspirational posters urge one to do, I made darn sure that clothesline is down on the list for the next box from town.

*Although the subsequent 24+ hour village-wide power outage a few hours later on one of the hottest days yet definitely would have. Suffice to say that tangled nests of wires festooning the village power poles are, like the Internet hook up, ghetto.