No one should be excited about a dryer. A dryer is a simple household appliance that spins damp, (theoretically) recently laundered articles of clothing in the optional presence of warm air until they are no longer wet. The description alone is boring enough that in the middle of writing it I caught myself looking at my watch and fighting off a case of the head nods. In other words, I think we can all agree that dryers are not synonymous with “Excitement!” And yet, the Puddinette and I are positively overjoyed (and slightly amazed) with our dryer at the moment.

I will grant you that we are not the world’s most exciting people. We have four children, two fish, two jobs, an addiction to Bejeweled Blitz (well, one of us does), an near-obsessive fascination with brewing, and a house to clean; we are not the poster parents for extreme lifestyles. Still, even we know we shouldn’t be all pumped about a dryer.

But we are.

We have a good reason, though. It seems that at the time we first occupied our current residence three years ago, the duct work that’s supposed to vent the damp dryer exhaust from the inside of said appliance to the great outdoors was largely blocked by seven years of previously accumulated dryer lint. Apparently the homeowners before us were stingy with cleaning the lint trap. Regardless, the linty blockage in our ducts was not yet unacceptable, but just enough at the time to prevent our summer loads from drying completely in one cycle. It was no big deal to throw the machine on for another 10 or 15 minutes. Heck, doing that made sure the stuff coming out was fresh, warm, and less wrinkled than a Malibu Barbie just home from the Barbie Dream Cosmetic Surgery Office, where she got a shiny new chemical peel from Cosmetic Surgeon Ken.

Over time, though, the dryer’s performance declined at an alarming rate. By the middle of January, the poor little appliance was so asphyxiated with damp air that it would often take four full cycles to complete a load of laundry. In other words, my Levi’s were spending more time getting tumbled about than they were being worn.

The more unfortunate side effect of all those dryer cycles was a great decrease in home morale. As I’ve mentioned before, the Puddinette doth fear and loath the Nefarious Uncompleted List of Tasks. You can imagine, then, what having a never-ending mass of laundry was doing to her precious psyche. As we aren’t exactly a small family, and the household was literally generating more laundry than we could successfully clean in a week, short of employing the neighborhood Oompa Loompas.

One day, ankle deep in soiled polos and unclean underoos, the Puddinette and I realized that there was Something Very Wrong. People shouldn’t have to live this, subserviently bound to a household appliance. So we called in a specialist to free our duct work from the vast clogging fibers of a thousand previously dried garments. The man made a blizzard of dryer lint in the back yard as he gave the venting a hard flush and at the same time gave us the freedom and joy normally reserved for those lucky folks in Depends commercials, who clearly haven’t a care in the world.

Yesterday, we washed and dried six loads of laundry, a feat borne of the impossible just two short months ago. I wept the great tears of joy, a man freed from the shackles of unending household toil. Are we lame to be so excited about simply drying our clothes? Well, yes, clearly. But then again, I was probably gonna be lame anyway, at least now my boxers aren’t damp.

pud’n