Washing Pile

Well, don't they say something about "the best laid plans of mice and men rats and woman"?

It was an easy start - do some introductions work with the babies, which went very well, then put a load of washing on and head up to my desk to settle down for a morning of maths work!

However, the washing machine had other ideas!

It stopped, full of water, flashing like a belisha beacon, and steadfastly refused to go any further.

I let the water out of the bottom (the door was stuck), then did my best to mop up with towels and whatever was lying around.

Then it released the door, and I got out the wet, dirty washing and dumped it all in a bucket.

Then I went back upstairs and did some googling to try to diagnose the fault.

Nope. Not the blocked filter thing this time.

It seemed an engineer was necessary.

Then I found the documents from buying the machine - dated 2007, so 5 years ago.

Then I googled "life expectancy of a washing machine".

It seemed like 5 years was probably OK, and actually pretty good for a very hard water area (we don't use Calgon, since I calculated that in 5 years we'd spend about 3 times the cost of a new washing machine on the stuff)!

So I just abandoned all messing around at that point, went onto the Argos website, and ordered a new one (adding to the debt already incurred by the purchase of a new car last week).

The new one will arrive on Monday - in the meantime, this pile of washing will continue to grow, and I need to go and buy some new underpants for the Wonderspouse because he has run out of clean ones.

By this stage my brain was starting to fizz in a slightly "do not keep pushing yourself or you might well tip over into mania" sort of way.

So I stopped, lay on the sofa, and fell asleep.

I woke, mid afternoon, feeling much calmer and more measured. The nice lady from Hotpoint rang to confirm Monday as the delivery date of the new machine.

I washed the kitchen floor and wrung out the wet mucky stuff and draped it onto an old clothes horse to drip dry, so at least it won't go mouldy before Monday.

Then the Wonderspouse got home, and we spent a fairly calm evening.

Phew!

Just a good job I'm already married - don't think I could have coped with proposing to anyone on top of all that washing machine stuff!