The Winter Honey-Do List

I’ve got a heavy-duty clothesline installed in my laundry room for drying clothes. We have eight-foot ceilings in our house, so hanging anything on it requires that I get out a stepstool, but that’s life. Most of my clothing gets dried on the line. I have trouble finding clothing that’s long enough to begin with, so I don’t want to risk shrinking it in the dryer. And I think it lasts longer when it’s line dried. Have you ever seen clothing that’s been “cooked” in the dryer? Yeah. Most people overdry their clothing.

I do put the husband’s clothing in the dryer, though, because it doesn’t seem to shrink as much. On Monday, I put a load in the dryer, turned the timer, and then realized—about two hours later—that the dryer was still running. What’s worse, the clothes were still damp and no heat was coming out. The husband spent about an hour monkeying around with the hose and got the heat working again, but the timer appears to be broken.

This is an Amana dryer that we bought when we built the house—in 1996. Its companion washing machine bit the dust a long time ago, as did that machine’s replacement, because washing machines don’t like to wash concrete-encrusted clothing. I am now on a Speed Queen heavy duty washer that seems to be holding up well.

He is going to hunt down a replacement timer and try to fix the dryer. Gone are the days when he could go down to the “green boxes”—the county dump sites—and cannibalize discarded appliances. The county made that practice illegal. (He fixed several of our appliances that way.) Even if he can’t fix it, I think we’ve gotten our money’s worth after 23 years. I am glad that the dryer waited to fail until the husband had time to work on it.

*********************************************************

One of our employees doesn’t like to sit around doing nothing, so we’ve been having him come over and help with the new shop and around the property. The business has money to pay him and he wants to work. Our other employees collect unemployment benefits for a couple of months when work slows down. The trees that have come down in windstorms this year need to be dealt with. The husband de-limbed some of them and sawed them into logs, then used the forklift to haul all the logs over to the woodshed. This kid split them with the log splitter, stacked them neatly, and covered them with a tarp:

He does any job the husband assigns him without complaint and does it well. He grew up on a ranch east of the mountains, which explains his work ethic. I sometimes wonder if concrete seems easy in comparison to ranching.

Cutting up the rest of the trees will have to wait until spring.

*********************************************************

I’m knee deep in potholders at the moment:

I get faster with each one, although I had to stop and make binding because I ran out. Each potholder takes almost a yard of binding. I’m binding these on the Janome 6600P with the even-feed foot. I make the binding on Vittorio.

My strategy is to pick an item and make a bunch of them until I get sick and tired of making them. I bound this pile yesterday while watching and listening to (and singing along to, of course) a BBC recording of The Messiah on YouTube. For some reason, my Christmas season is not complete without listening to the entire piece.

After the holidays, I’m going to start making some zipper pouches.