Yikes! I’ve gone silent again. This must be resisted.
Of course it’s all more difficult now. There are more steps between me and communication. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Say “NO” to a huge explanation of how the silence came about. Pick a topic and start talking. Laundry!
Dry camping is no big deal. They had it tougher crossing the prairies, and yet they managed to post on their blogs, using cast-iron tools. I can, too. And I can do the laundry. When we first came here, we used the laundromat in town but… come on. No fun.
The laundromat’s kinda yucky, and the atmosphere is hit or miss. The last time I went, there was a mated pair having such intense disharmony that it had to be carried on right there in front of the dryers, in accusing, bitter tones. I didn’t need to understand the language to get the general drift. I felt only slightly more miserable having to stay there and witness it than the principles sounded carrying it on.
After that I came home, squirted some blue Dawn in a bucket of water, washed my clothes and hung them on the line. It was one dress, a pair of socks and a couple washcloths, and hanging on a line in the woods looked so picturesque I could have just exploded with how cute it was and how proud I was of myself. Why didn’t I take a picture? Anyway I took a picture several loads later, when it was becoming a thing and I was getting my act together.
I found a new gadget for laundry! Turns out they had them in olden times. I’ve seen them in museums and not known what they were. “Cone-shaped thing on a long stick.”
This isn’t an ad. I put this picture here. This fellow’s face expresses my feelings better than my face would.
In retrospect, after using it several times and figuring out how to be more efficient about everything, I didn’t really need it. One of Jeff’s old oars works about as well for skooshing the clothes around in the tub. Modern laundry soap is what really does the job. But the gadget helped with hope and enthusiasm at the beginning, so that was good.
The “backbreaking labor” part of the proposition is not so much the scrubbing, but the lifting and wringing of wet clothes. They get sooooo heavy, esp the denim trousers and flannel sheets. I could buy a wringer sometime maybe.
Meanwhile, that big black container in the center of the picture is a garden pot that had a bunch of holes drilled in it. I drilled even more holes, coiled a big rope on the ground beneath it, dumped my sopping wet clothes in there, and stomped around on em with my bare feet as if treading out the wine. That gets them quite well squeezed out.
On my first try, that folding plastic table was too low, so I was bent over to scrub, and that contributed to the exhaustion. Now there’s a great pallet that Jeff fixed for me that puts the table at the perfect height.
So here’s the procedure. First, I inspect the item for stains, because they don’t show when it gets wet. Then wet it, put it on the table and scrub those spots with a brush dipped in diluted dish soap (easy on the hands). Then the clothes go into a 5-gal bucket with modern commercial laundry detergent mixed up pretty strong. Yay for chemicals! Hands don’t go in there. Skoosh with the gadget for a few minutes. Leave and do something else. Come back and skoosh some more, then dump the whole load into the drainer. Do something else. Come back and throw the mostly-dripped clothes into the rinse water. Then back in the drainer and stomp all over them! Rinse again, stomp again. That gets the heavy weight of water out but they’re still very wet, so I throw the garments on the line sideways. They’re going to stretch out, but it’s okay because they’re stretching widthwise. I come back after they’ve dried a bit and rotate them.
And fun??? Absolutely delightful. I wake up in the morning on laundry day like, “oh boy guess what I get to do today!!” In my lovely sunny woods with my dog wanting the stick thrown and my husband working nearby. He even told me once that I look cute doing the laundry.
🥰
The biggest surprise from all this is the PRIDE when you wash clothes yourself. Can’t say “oh the washer didn’t get it very clean.” If it isn’t very clean, nobody failed but me. So I get the stains out. Jeff’s heavy carpenter jeans come out CLEAN and bright blue. His white t-shirts come out mostly sparkling white, at least no longer as icky looking as formerly. He told me when I started trying this that if the clothes just come out not sweaty any more, that’s all we need. I never expected my washing to be cleanER.
I took this picture of the 7-gal boxes we use for carrying the potable water inside. There’s other water in those big square IBC tanks for laundry. We use the IBC to carry water up from town, then drain it into the big potable tank, that Jeff put such a lovely modern faucet on, that I can connect a hose and fill the boxes up myself. The leftover water in the IBC is for doing laundry with.
It’s all so much fun! So independent! We are pioneers.
We had to walk away from all that other nonsense and just head out west (it was located towards the east) and start a new life. Hard work is part of the deal but that’s okay. We can hold our heads up now. It was TEOTWAWKI, the end of the world as we knew it.
Both of us were preppers in our own little way, and now it’s time to use all those things we’d been collecting. Jeff’s old manual tools and my manual sewing machine come in handy. Wool blankets and candles are useful now.
I think we have maybe more practical skills than average, and yet when we got out here and actually tried it, we did some things the dumb way or the hard way at first.
Everybody wants to do this! And yet, if things hadn’t gone wrong just right in our last gig, we wouldn’t have “had no choice but” to come out here and sink or swim.
I’ve always wanted to head for the wild woods and carve out a home, but when the time came for it to begin to be reality, I might have chickened out, if I could have.
Some people have to play games like these to simulate this experience. We’re doing it!
There we are. That’s my darling and me.
That one had on its loading screen, “All we need is love! And wide-open spaces of prairie.”
We have love and just a little patch of woods 🙂
Leave a Reply