What Saving Energy Looks like

Now that the news has died down over Bigfoot (and really too bad: this weekend was the Skamania County Bigfoot Festival. I didn’t go: I had energy to save instead.), I need to finish up with my story about my clothesline.

We had a nice weekend almost two weeks ago and Don was home at the same time (that rarely happens these days), so I suggested that we put up that clothesline I got from the neighbor behind the chainlink fence. Actually, we had a couple yard projects to do and that was just one of them. The other was repairing the Murphy damage to my Murphy-proof fence that wasn’t Murphy-proof. It is now.

We made a trip down to Home Depot for the fence parts I needed (two more posts) and the cement Don needed to set the clothesline into the ground. At home, Don pulled the old clothesline out and unthreaded all the old line so he could see if the thing would even work. It did, but it was really, really short. It looked like a piece of pipe was missing or it was manufactured for a person who stands no taller than 48″ tall. Not going to work without some jury-rigging. Some of the cotter pins were rusted through as well, so we would have to replace those or jury-rig something in their place.

Back to Home Depot. We looked at several options for extending the length of the pipe holding up the clothesline: conduit, PVC and even standard chain-link fence parts. I can’t even remember what we decided on, but the dollars were adding up pretty quickly. On our way out of the store, we decided we needed new clothesline as well, so we headed up the aisle we thought that would be on. And there, neatly displayed were BRAND NEW umbrella-style clotheslines. Now I looked online at Home Depot and they did not carry such a beast. Neither does Lowes. But there were several in the display and they were priced at $29.95. Which was about how much we were spending on my “free” clothesline.

We bought the new one.

So this is what Don did on the 10th of August:

This

Plus this and some water, mixed well, poured into the hole Don already had dug, with the capped-off slot for the clothesline in the center

equals this: Murphy made his mark on it (sorry, no dog foot print!) and Don dated it.

That was two weeks ago. today was the first day I have had an opportunity to use it because 1)we were gone last weekend when it was in the triple digits and 2) the rain came back all last week.

It fit into the slot just fine.

Easy to set up!

The first two loads of laundry have been hung out to dry!

Now, I have used a clothesline most of my life. I’m pretty good at being able to hang clothes for the minimum amount of wrinkle and the maximum amount of drying. There are rules to hanging clothes out to dry (in my mind which is pretty anal about such things). For instance: all socks must be hung in pairs. Then, when they are dry and you retrieve them from the clothesline, they’re already sorted. And button down shirts need to be hung from the shirttails.

When we paid for the new clothesline, this very young sales clerk rang it up.

“How does that work?” she asked innocently.

I bit my tongue, which is a good thing because she clarified her question.

“I mean, I always thought about getting one, but I imagined your clothes would dry all crunchy-sort of.”

Yes, they dry “all crunchy sort-of”. Some folks won’t hang their towels on clotheslines because they don’t like the stiff feel of air-dried clothes. I just shake out the towel when I go to fold it.

And some clothes items, like my black jersey blouse washed with this same load of laundry, need to be run through a dryer just to pull the lint off. And since I am a sensitive neighbor, I tossed all the newly washed underwear into the dryer as well. I wouldn’t want my 80-year old neighbor to go into a heart attack. ;-P

It worked quite well, by the way.