"The only way to get through life
is to laugh your way through it.
You either have to laugh or cry.
I prefer to laugh.
Crying gives me a headache."
--Marjorie Pay Hinckley
*****
What have I been doing nearly every waking moment for the past three weeks? (Note that by "nearly every waking moment" I mean those times when I'm not eating or watching Netflix or reading the entire interwebs or playing Ruzzle.) All those other times when I'm awake, what have I been doing?
That's right--I've been prettying up my laundry room.
And what is Murphy's Law?
That's right--anything that can go wrong, will.
So what happened Saturday night was barely even a blip on the radar of my life.
I put a load of laundry in the dryer, turned on the dryer, and heard a nasty crispy crackling noise that sounded kinda like a deep fryer when you drop in a piece of chicken. Then I saw an orange-ish light glowing behind the dryer. I leaned over to look behind the dryer and saw a tiny flame licking out of the back of it. Well, schidt. It says a lot about me and the way things go in this house that I didn't freak out or cry when I realized the clothes dryer was on fire. I just heaved a big sigh, pushed the damn thing out away from the wall, unplugged it, and waited to see if the flames would die down on their own. They did. Then I opened a window so the icky electrical smoke would go outside rather than all through the house, and I went into the kitchen and got a can of club soda to drink while I sat in the plastic chair out in the laundry room and waited for the smoke to clear and the dryer to cool off. After the back of the dryer was cool to the touch, I opened it, got my sheets out, and then rigged up a clothesline by tying string from one transom window to the other in my bedroom. I could have gone to the 24-hour laundrymat in the next town over, but I was afraid the house might catch fire while I was gone and I wanted to be there to see it in case all my hard work went up in flames. I thought about playing the Talking Heads song "Burning Down The House" while I hung up my laundry but decided that might be tempting fate a bit much, so I played James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" as a sort of B-side.
On my next day off, I'll call the repairman on the chance that he can fix the dryer, but I'm pretty sure he'll tell me that it not only died, it cremated itself.
The bright note in this story is that I've been saving up money to rebuild the front porch so hey! I can buy a new dryer with that money instead.