Shouts From Down Under

Laundry...various basket cases with International flavour...

How's it hangin bru's and sis'?

I found a rivetting blog topic this arvo, while hanging out another load of washing, here in Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia.

This town is located roughly in the middle of NSW, in the middle of a heat wave, in the centre of a years long drought. We hope it won't be in the centre of a bushfire...there are men out there at Rocky Glen fighting it even as I type this blog.

I extend a serious thank you to those men and women, doing their best to save property, wildlife and guard against injury or death of civilians. Farmers, Townsfolk and Carers of the elderly. That's me.

So, laundry doesn't sound that important. That's why I'm blogging on it. It's an escape from reality. I want to peg a sheet over the worries of today and ask the question of everyone who reads this, and everyone else on WdC.

How do you hang your laundry where you live?

Do you hang it on a clothes line, or just used a clothes dryer?

Do you use clothes pegs? Do you call them clothes pegs?

Do you hang clothes a certain way? Keep the socks paired and the pockets pulled out? Do you balance the clothes line with heavy stuff evenly distributed around so that it takes care of the mechanism of the clothes hoist? Does anyone ever lubricate the hoist gears?

Do you peg the items overlapping with a single economical peg, or do you peg your clothing separately, so it will dry properly?

In SC Charleston, one friend said she only uses a dryer but uses "pegs" to keep packets closed.

Another in Pennsylvania said she doesn't hang any out, just uses a dryer and assumes other people would run a line inside or whatever. She said that it's important to remove the clothing soon after the load is finished otherwise wrinkles happen.

So...what do YOU do?

We peg it out here together, overlapping because it dries within half an hour. Easily.
But in Sydney and Tasmania, in the coastal areas anyway, laundry sometimes has to be pegged separately so that it dries. These areas have high humidity.

I'm still thinking about making some sort of information data base of trivia on WdC that everyone can access and enter their bit of local colour.
Be it laundry pegs, buying second hand car parts, or baking a loaf of bread.
Laws on snow shovelling driveways and nature strips.

Whatever it is, this sort of local knowlege would not ever be thought of as important enough to grace wikipedia etc.

I wonder what would be the best way to do this. I'm thinking a "book" so there's plenty of entries available. Then maybe folders within the book, containing books in them. So people could write up entries for each country in separate books, and have drop down entry headings for states, citys and subject.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed today's weird subject.

And why not? Have you ever seen such an historical collection of "clothes pegs", that must span decades of domestic dedication delivering detachment to dozens of daily doses of duplicate duds on different ....ooooooook, I've run out of D words.

My dad has welded a thin diameter rod on the laundry trolley, in the square shape, and correct size, of a 2 litre (1 gallon?) plastic ice-cream container for the pegs (known as pins in some areas, as per comment section below) and added a small lid cut from tin, edges folded for safety and hinges made from tie wire. Quite the recycler, my Dad.

Photos coming later, as usual, when I drive down town to where there is some sort of phone coverage.



Sparky

** Image ID #1958258 Unavailable **