732nd Post - A Mad Dash

I am taking a break now to update this blog, albeit briefly.

My parents are coming to visit here on Wednesday night. My mother has surgery on Thursday. That means that Bevboy has to clean his house sufficiently 'twixt now and then, lest they cluck their tongues and pronouce the house unfit to live in. Again.

It isn't that bad. Really. But when you work all day, rising early in the morning and oftentimes not returning home until after dark, there remains little time for thinks like cleaning the house. It's not like the cat will do anything while I am gone.

I put off doing my laundry until I am in danger of running out of unmentionables. I realize that the washing machine actually does most of the work; but I still have to sort the clothes and put the detergent in and study which combination of water temperature, level, and mode works best for the pile of clothing I am about to offer to my Maytag. It is a bewildering, and by times confounding, permutation that makes me put off doing laundry until it can be delayed no longer.

And don't get me started on putting the clothes away, nicely piled and clean and nice smelling. It is very time consuming, especially with the socks.

What do your socks look like? I have, I don't know, 30 pairs of white gym socks. I wear a different pair every day. I wash them in hot water, with a bit of bleach, and using the most aggressive washing mode available to me. I usually hang them to dry.

Then I take them upstairs.

And the hard work begins.

I love my mother. Really. I do. But she has bought me most of my socks over the years. And the design on the socks is subtly different for many of the pairs. Every month or so, when I have to, I place all of these socks on my bed, and study them for similarities. When I find pairs that look alike, I put them in a smaller pile, sometimes for further examination to ensure that they really "belong" in that pile of hosiery. I continue this process until I am, theoretically, down to my last pair. But it never works that way. I always have 3 or so socks left over, socks whose design neither matches nor even resembles the ones I have just classified. I have very often spent over an hour reaching this point. Unbelievably frustrating.

I roll the socks together, inside out, to form a ball containing a pair of matched socks. I put each of these balls into one of the drawers in my dresser.

For the remaining socks, those that don't match one another, I just stuff them in a drawer, sometimes with other socks that don't look like other socks, because if I threw them out, I figure, I would at some time locate these errant socks, and would never have the mate again.

I am sooo grateful not to have to wear black dress socks much any more. The designs on those puppies are even more subtle.

Why do I do this?

Well, I guess it is one of my neuroses. You'll just have to get used to it.

I am worried that if I didn't sort these socks, or at least make an effort to, and if I were in an accident, unconscious, perhaps babbling incoherently, I might be taken to the hospital. If the injury were severe enough, they would have to cut me out of my pants to examine more closely the grievous wounds which landed me there. Imagine how I would feel, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, if they did that and took a look at my socks. They would say something like, "Look, my fellow colleagues! Ha ha! This poor devil's socks don't match. See? The designs are subtly different. His mother must have bought them for him, and he couldn't be bothered to sort them after doing his laundry! I don't think he is worth saving!"

I would be thrown out of the emergency room, all for the want of matched socks. I would perhaps then die, my pants having been removed by a pair of scissors, injured, on a gurney in the hall way. All because my damned socks were not sorted properly.

That's why I do it. And why you should, too.

Any questions?

Bev