Sunday, April 22, 2007

I can't wait to go to bed

Why? Because I washed my bed sheets today and line dried them in the sunshine. It's the first weekend of the year here where this has really worked out, because winter has been white-knuckling this city for a while. (It looks like it finally got the hint that it's time for tulips and tomato plants and canoe trip planning.)

I washed my sheets in unscented enviro-friendly detergent, so I can guaran-damn-tee you that the only smell in there is fresh air. I am telling you, it's divine. I have some pajamas and other assorted laundry that I dried out there too, and I tried to get the Irish to sniff them before dinner tonight. They said "we'll take your word for it."

(Apparently Kate and Phil, aka "the Irish" - line-dry everything in Ireland, because winter there isn't the frozen-nosehair treat that it is here.)

I'm so pleased with myself about these dang sheets that it's hard to summon the immense vitriol that I cultivated reading Lullabies for Little Criminals, a book that drove me nuts, and which I have been planning to write about. I joked with a friend of mine that by the end of it I was reading it just to savour my own righteous indignation at how awful it was to read. More on that later. I have fresh clean white crisp perfect sheets to climb into.

Feeling pissy? Feeling blue? Line-dried sheets will turn everything around. Try it!

3 Comments:

At April 23, 2007 2:56 a.m., Anonymous Anonymous said...

perhaps a little oddly, this reminds me of how my cat sometimes used to come into the house on cold damp winter days with his thick fur perfumed with wood smoke from the woodstoves in the neighbourhood. There never was a lovelier scent, made more lovely by its ephemeral and unexpected quality.

Mind you, line dried sheets that have been rained on and then redried are less delightful.

 
At April 23, 2007 10:12 a.m., Anonymous Anonymous said...

Lullabies For Little Criminals is the worst book I have ever "looked into" - not being able to read it through. It's similes and metaphors remind me of the gaudy trash in E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, a novel in which she ( completely incorrectly) describes the look of Atlantic Ocean waves (I give you "daggers on a nail" instead of simply saying "the waves were topped with white foam") and the manners and mores of the people of eastern Canada. May its name vanish!

 
At April 23, 2007 11:30 a.m., Anonymous Anonymous said...

An amendment to what I said about E. Annie Proulx's metaphors. Although she had equally innefectual metaphors for the sea, the metaphor "daggers on a nail" is really "hammer on a nail", which was supposed to describe one character looking intensely at another. (Always a danger of slipping into cliche when trying to do this, but oh well). This is pulled from memory. If I were to take one of millions of copies of her book now moudering in used bookstores (next to the Celestine Prophecy, a book that was drooled over by multitudes, now utterly forgotten) and flip to any page, I could produce dozens of these little gems. Now banjeroo, please give us a taste of what awaits us between the glossy covers of Bedtime For Crybabies or whatever it's called.

 

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