Modern conveniences

We installed one of those automatic washing machines in the house. It's quite a trip. You just load the clothes into the metal drum and add soap, and the machine does all of the washing, rinsing and even wringing out; the clothes emerge halfway to dry. It's quite astonishing, and I have spent some time in recent days just sitting on the floor watching the laundry go round and round inside the machine. A remarkably soothing pastime, that.

After hanging a load or two out on the line to dry only to have the rains return and re-soak them, we also reclaimed the dryer from the mice and installed that, too. Achieving clean, dry laundry is suddenly all but effortless; why has this not somehow resulted in large quantities of free time?

Transporting appliances into the house was not soothing at all. The washing machine was conveniently located on the front porch, but the dryer, range and refrigerator, which we also put in, were three hundred feet away. After considering the mechanics of transporting them across the still-open trench between the shed and pickup truck, we opted instead to haul them down the path on a handtruck.

The path, it turns out, is not at all level, and it is, furthermore, decorated here and there with holes dug by the ever-enterprising terrier. The less said about that adventure, the better. But we didn't drop any of the appliances on anybody, not even the refrigerator -- which had, of course, to be transported upright, which was damned awkward and difficult -- and nobody murdered anybody else. Not that anybody was considering such a thing. Ahem. 

Meanwhile, the seedlings have continued to grow and demand ever more space and they filled up the cold frame and spilled out into the garden. When I began complaining about not having enough room to protect all the heat-loving crops like tomatoes, DH stepped in to help, and we built another, slightly larger one that more than doubles the available space. Then, as I have also been complaining about lack of pots for  transplanting, we took the sawzall to a large pallet that had arrived at some point under a load of wood and had since been doing nothing but occupying space and looking attractive.

It was conveniently made of one by four-inch lengths of wood nailed to supports, and once freed from pallet duty, they were handily repurposed into wooden plant trays. Well, one wooden plant tray thus far, the rest await sawing and nailing. But it's beautiful and I can't wait to make more.

My tray-building enterprise was interrupted by the arrival of a load of wood for building kitchen cabinets and stairs, all of which had to be carried indoors, and all of which was, of course, not only tremendously heavy and awkward, but also terribly fragile.

Fortunately, DH had acquired some plywood carriers that made the job much easier, although they were, as we observed to each other over the course of an exhausting afternoon, very hard on the wrists. And the elbows. And the shoulders. But other than that, they made the job a breeze.

"There," he said, as we stood around panting after staggering in with the final sheet of maple plywood. "Wasn't that a bit of fun?"

This was a generous take, since we'd had to redistribute the weight so that he carried more of it than I did, after I cried uncle three sheets into the job, and threatened to start dropping them. Poor DH has to make do with a very inept and wimpish assistant who is, moreover, a foot shorter than him, making for some very lopsided loads.

Then we went out and carried in all the lengths of wood for the stairs and molding. But at least  they were reasonable sizes, not nearly as tall as I am.

Tomorrow, carpentry commences. Tonight, we sleep.