...and up your nose and in your lungs too when your dryer catches on fire. The Hub and I feel really really blessed that we were home when all of this happened, we noticed it right away, and there wasn't any damage, except to the dryer itself. But, in the effort to find the fire, I really irritated my throat and lungs. I guess it's from breathing in the smoke, though surely I couldn't have inhaled very much of it.

So now, not surprisingly, I have asthma. It's not like there's anybody to blame but myself. Well, I could blame the dryer, but, since it's an inanimate object that's not real real satisfying. Anyway, it seems to be getting better as long as I use my inhalers.

Probably the worst thing about the whole episode was taking all the wet clothes out of the washer and dryer and going up to the laundromat to dry them up there. We didn't go to the laundromat in town, even though it's a little nicer. There are sometimes people my mother would refer to as "shady characters" hanging around down there in the evening.

Sunday night is NOT the best night to have to use a laundromat. In the first place, nobody likes to use the laundromat, so people who regularly use the laundromat wait until they will be naked if they don't do their laundry. That's how I always was when I didn't have a washer/dryer in an apartment. I could go for 3 weeks without doing laundry. In the second place, on Sunday nights that people look around, realize that they don't have anything to wear to work/school the next day, that they need to get something washed, and, while they're at it, they ought to drag the 8 million tons of dirty clothes in their house with them and do them all at the same time.

So. There we were, post dryer fire, in the launderama with two guys who looked like they had never heard of soap let alone used any, two exhausted looking migrant workers who didn't speak any English and a mother attempting to oversee approximately 12 different washers, 7 dryers, and three teenaged girls. The older teenager was okay, but the younger two were about 13 or so. It just has to be said: they were obnoxious. While I was aware that I was every bit as obnoxious in my teen years, that didn't make the teenaged launderama queens any less obnoxious. And they really WERE being launderama queens: they went up to the drug store and bought themselves pink plastic crowns - the kind that are made for preschool girls playing dress up - and posed themselves for digital photos draped all over the equipment while shrieking at the tops of their lungs. They ate Valentine chocolates out of a box they'd bought at half price and threw the papers everywhere. They moaned that they were sick and couldn't go to school the next day. They threw semi-dry laundry at one another - over my head - insisting that they were "folding it"

And of course, this was one of those long thin launderamas, shoved into a narrow space in between the Chinese restaurant that gave The Hub food poisoning and a tutoring center up in the shopping center. So there was nothing to do but drag the laundry into the fray and deal with it. Now, I didn't find this a great way to spend my time, but it wasn't anything new to me. I don't think The Hub had ever been in a laundromat before in his life though, and I'm pretty sure he never wants to be in one again. He sat there on the sole bench in the place near the door giving everyone in the place the kill-em-all-let-God-sort-em-out look ( the look he gets when he isn't smiling. Believe me, he was NOT smiling) scaring the immigrants and causing the girls to shriek and squeal more to try to get some other kind of reaction (i.e. the top of his head to blow off)

"You know what? We're idiots." he finally said.

"Why do you say that?" I asked, truly worried about what he was going to say.

"Because we have a perfectly functional dryer sitting down at the old house, and we're up here instead."

He was right. Neither one of us had thought of it. We had already been in that launderama for an hour, and, by that time the clothes were pretty much dry. I just started laughing. What else, really, was there to do?