laundry fiasco in shades of blue

For those of you that followed my little drama yesterday on Twitter, you had to know there was a post in there begging to be written. Well here it is!

I was doing great yesterday. The day had gotten off to a pretty good start. I had done my WiiFit time and I felt pretty good about that. The other big thing on the agenda was laundry. (cue the ominous music) So I grabbed a stack of jeans and tossed them in the wash without a second thought. After all, I do this several times a week evvvvery single week. I've got this thing down.

I waited on the washer to finish and this is what I found! It is exactly what it looks like. Ink. Blue ink to be exact. A ballpoint pen exploded in my washer! I gathered up the BLUE jeans and put them in the dryer after giving them a quick once over.. after all, from the looks of the side of the drum there, it kinda stayed in one place. You may laugh out loud at me right now.. go ahead.. I'll wait! So! I had to figure out how to clean the drum. I checked and the ink was still very wet, which in my mind, at the time, seemed like a good thing. So I grabbed the rubbing alcohol and some paper towels and got to work.



I got most of it out, but it left a blue-ish stain on the drum. I worried that it would get on the clothes I washed in the future. But I put everything I could think of it on it and this is the best it got in there. I tried the alcohol, of course. And the Magic Eraser (which did nothing), Goof Off (which did nothing), and WD40 (which also did nothing). So I left it alone for a bit while I thought about my predicament.

By that time, dryer had gone off and I could take a look at my jeans. It was probably my lifesaver that they were still damp! Come to find out, wet jeans look exactly like blue ink. Who'dathunkit! So! I had two more messes on my hands. The jeans and the dryer drum. It had gotten on several spots on the jeans. And little bitty smears all over the dryer drum. So I first off set to work on the drum. I mainly used the alcohol and the Goof Off. Goof Off is sort of petroleum-y smelling. I don't even want to think about how many brain cells I lost with my head inside my dryer while I scrubbed at little spots of blue all over the drum. But I finally got the dryer to a passable state.

And then it was time to tackle the jeans. I hit them with everything in the world. I did online searches, I Twittered and I hit the ladies email at church and tried every single suggestion that came in. I did hairspray, alcohol, Goof Off and finally Dawn dishwashing liquid. Dawn was the last suggestion I got and it was the thing that got the last bits of blue out of the jeans. WHEW. It took me most of the day to get the jeans clean, but I was so thankful I was able to save them. It was worth all the blotting and the two ruined cloth diapers!

Somewhere along the line, I had to drop everything and run to Kroger. I hadn't picked up anything for Friday night or what we would need over the weekend. So I put everything I had been scrubbing down and just walked away. It was a nice break from the scrubbing and the smell of cleaners. I grabbed the few things I needed and came home and went about quickly unloading the groceries so I could get back to my laundry fiasco.

But the grocery bag handle broke. And pizza sauce and marinaded mushrooms splatted all over the place. So I had to get on my hands and knees and clean up THAT mess too. Thankfully the bag caught most of the glass and sauce etc. Not all. Most. So I got all of that cleaned up and by then it was lunchtime and I stopped long enough to sit down and eat some reheated leftovers.

That's when I saw this! You can barely see it on the picture, but it's pizza sauce splatted against the toe kick of the cabinets. So I got on my hands and knees AGAIN to clean up more sauce. Finally, that mess was completely done.

And all I had to contend with was the jeans. It took the better part of the day. I had not finished scrubbing jeans yet when it was time to pick up my daughter from school. When we got home, she immediately said WHAT HAPPENED HERE??? as we walked through the laundry room into the house. I washed a load of old towels in hot water and bleach and the drum came completely clean! I was shocked... but thrilled! Then I rewashed the jeans after I finally got them clean, and hung them to dry. When they had dried enough to see that they were indeed 'ok', I tossed them in the dryer. I hung them up around bedtime.

We ordered a pizza last night. I was too tired to care about anything by mealtime!

In the words of the famous anchorwoman, Rosanne RosannaDana "It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another." By the end of the day, I was tired. T.I.R.E.D. But in the famous words of Scarlet O'Hara, "tomarrah is anuthu day".

And on a side note.. you know you're a blogger when you drop everything mid-mess and run for the camera. More than once.