Out of the mouths of babes ...

Said to me by my 7 year old this week: You look like a poor housewife!

While trying not to laugh, I simply said, well, I am a housewife!

We had this conversation on the deck as I was hanging up some laundry on my drying lines. Yes, this week I have discovered the joy of line drying my laundry. Which, really, is sort of dumb since winter is coming and all. You think I might have discovered this, oh, at the start of summer with lots of warm days to take advantage of!



But I have discovered some very important things. Despite thinking all things would come off the line stiff, very few items actually come off feeling that way. Clothes do smell good when they dry that way. And thanks to my highly inefficient dryer, most of our clothes are actually drying faster outside than they would in the dryer! I kid you now, more than a few items have dried in less than 30 minutes on the line. The average run time for my dryer - 90 minutes. Longer with jeans and towels. I have actually done more laundry line drying this week than I normally do waiting for our dryer. I even asked dh to figure out a way to do this in the winter-time (although realistically without us adding on to the house, there is no place to add some lines inside the house!). I tell you, I do wish I had discovered how fabulous this is in April instead of mid-September, but what's done is done. And now I know. And every warm day we get from here on out will probably be dubbed laundry day for me.

I just have to tell you, I have now run 7 loads of laundry this week, and have run the dryer a mere 2 hours time (I am not hanging up all our clothes. Frankly, the neighbors don't need to see our undies flapping in the wind! Nor am I hanging up the dishcloths, I don't have enough room or clips for those guys. And some clothes I am running for about 15 minutes to soften them up a bit).

Which brings me to another point. My mom said she would not be allowed to line dry in her neighborhood. The covenant bans it. And she was surprised none of my neighbors had complained to me about it yet. Is this really true? If you lived next to me, would you be complaining? The clothes are hanging on part of my deck, in the backyard, can not be seen from the road and are not flapping near the property lines. I can't imagine why someone would complain about it frankly. Of all the things to complain about, some laundry, really? I mean, it's not loud. It's doesn't cause a smell. It doesn't pollute. It doesn't interfere with anything going on at their house. Now I'm a little bit paranoid that I have ticked off my neighbors by drying my clothes on my deck. Although, I'm not that worried about it because as I said, I can't understand what the problem would be.

So what about you? Or your neighborhood?