We had an exciting day around here. Four of the six of us got our peepers checked professionally; the Puddinette and I for the annual contact lens order, the daughter for her pre-kindergarten screening, and the second son because he’s been complaining about not being able to see clearly. We were honestly not surprised to be told he might need optical assistance; good natural vision is kind of just a concept around these parts, much like space flight – sure, there are apparently people paid to fly around and live in space, but I’ve never seen it in person. If you stood the wife and I before an unabashedly crimson hay barn with a bulls-eye painted on the ever popular “broad side”, removed all forms of our respective corrective eye wear, and asked us to each throw a ball against the target, we would reply, in unison, “what barn?”. The kids are probably all doom to lenses of some kind.

So, the young lady and I had our eyes poked and prodded this morning and the Puddinette took our son after lunch for an afternoon visit to the eye doctor. Determined to do Something Productive while she was away, I settled on reducing the extensive pile of dirty laundry aging in our closet. Until this week, laundry had been a losing battle en la casa de Puddin because, unbeknown to us, our dryer venting has, since we moved in, resembled something much closer to a drinking straw stuffed with play-doh than a tunnel through which air is capable of moving. It seems our dryer duct is laid out much like cooked spaghetti. Such a fabulous design offers a multitude of places for the accumulation of dryer lint, resulting in the kind of blockage only a cardiovascular surgeon can truly appreciate.

So we had the venting purged this week and today garments practically whizzed through the laundry room in what, to us, seemed a frenzied storm of washing, rinsing, spinning, and drying. Last Sunday, I think we managed to get two whole loads laundered all day, and it took until midnight to get the second load completely dry. Today, we more than doubled that, and I have plans to get another load or two completed, still. I will readily admit to being ashamed and embarrassed by my reaction to something as mundane as laundry, but yes, this afternoon I marveled, giddy, at the wonder of having a load dry in Just.One.Cycle.

I was so pleased, in fact, that I decided to do the Puddinette a favor and took a few moments to (poorly) fold the warm jeans, just out of our incredible new drying device (folding is *not* my responsibility, but that’s a different post). I guess the point here is that, sometimes, it’s nice to have a low-stress weekend where you don’t kill yourself with projects to collect a fleeting few moments of gladness. My lens prescription didn’t get any worse last year, my second son is thrilled with the glasses he picked out today, and I’m waiting gleefully for my everyday household appliance to simply do its job within what most people would consider standard operating specifications.

The little things often do mean quite a lot.

pud’n