Laundry Mathematics
July 25th, 2008. Filed under: Finance & Fitness Fridays.
I’ve been trying to figure out how laundry multiplies. There doesn’t seem to be much logic to it. I did two, sometimes three loads weekly prior to Consumer Man moving back in. That has turned into five or six loads a week now. I would think that the most that would happen would be a doubling of the laundry. Some things like sheets and dish towels don’t double. It doesn’t stop at laundry, either.
Utility bills get interesting. Water has more than doubled. He hasn’t mastered short showers. Or even medium length showers. But he has long showers down pat. I could take three showers, including a shampoo, in the length of time he takes one. I would get totally bored trying to figure out what to do in the shower for that long. I don’t nag. He does pay part of the bills, but I am going to try to find one of those waterproof clocks to put in the shower to help him realize just how much time he spends in there. 30 minutes can really shoot up the water bill. Also, I now run the dishwasher every day or two instead of one or two times a week.
Naturally, these start the power bill on it’s way skyward. Add in the television. I wish I could not add in the television. I get so tired of that noise. The only time Consumer Man is home and it’s not turned on is when he’s asleep. That’s if he hasn’t fallen asleep in front of it. Then I can quietly turn it off. He even reads with it running in the background. I can go to my office/sewing room and close the door or go outside to escape. But sometimes I get tired of escaping. I would like to be able to sit down in the kitchen and read or even write out my grocery list. This past month I’ve had my little set turned on three times – twice to watch a DVD and once to watch a program that was mentioned in one of my charity groups. Consumer Man is getting better about turning off the lights.. The A/C is my doing. I set the programmable thermostat and he usually doesn’t bother it.
And then there’s cable. I could live without it, but we now have all the bells and whistles except for the premium channels like Showtime and HBO. That doubled our cable bill as my thing is high-speed Internet. My frugal mindset won’t let go of that. I have given up a lot of things for the sake of becoming debt free, but this isn’t going to be one of them. He also has Netflix which wasn’t unreasonable until he decided to up it to 2 DVDs at a time instead of one. That’s another thing that isn’t logical. If we get two instead of one, why is the price three times the original price? We’ve just had a Red Box come to town. Maybe a $1.00 DVD rental will be appealing to him. It appeals to me. The only thing better is the public library. Again, laundry mathematics.
Laundry mathematics even follows me to the grocery. Why does that triple instead of double. Has anyone else experienced the illogical equation of one plus one equals three or four?
September 16th, 2010 at 11:56
Very interesting to read it 😛 😀
September 17th, 2010 at 19:30
Thank you.