The curse of the clothes horse

As I have mentioned before, I lost all my clothes in the mold incident of '06. I have, however, managed to beef up the wardrobe in the past few months, in part on my own, and in major part thanks to various parental figures. One person in particular took me on a wonderfully exorbitant shopping trip where I was bought an absolutely fabulous tank top costing at least three times what I would ever pay for a tank top. It makes my boobs look great and is interesting while not being overwhelming, thereby wearable with pretty much everything: jeans, skirts, work, play. Because it was expensive and because the tag says to, I always wash it by hand. Yes me, washing things by hand. Shocking. I wore it out to the pub last night and so it smelt like an ashtray this morning. Playing at being a dutifully responsible adult, I decided to do some hand laundry this afternoon in an effort to avoid the cigarette smells becoming a permanent part of the fabric. In addition to the tank, I washed my new favourite long-sleeved top from Anthropologie (a birthday present), some French lingerie and a couple of other things. When I do hand laundry, I'm exceedingly careful to keep the colours way the hell away from the lights, which is what I did today. So, I washed and rinsed and washed and rinsed, careful not to rub too hard or wring too much. And then I carried the items out to dry and discovered that my two favourite shirts and my expensive lingerie are covered in big, ugly, brown stains.

Swearing furiously, I returned to the laundry room to soak them again. And that's where Z found me, crying and banging my head against the window. He stood looking at me like you look at something that's about to explode in a big bad terribly no good way. Which is pretty much what I felt like doing, so his concern was justified.

At first I didn't understand what had happened. Then it came to me: the culprit is the fucking laundry basket we use to carry clothes out to hang on the line. It has left brown stains over all our clothes, stains we thought were caused by the oil seal failing on the washing machines we bought from the cheapo dirtbag salesman on Syndey Rd. You know, the three washing machines we went through before finally stomping into the shop and demanding our money back for them and the fridge which was also, at that point, not working. We couldn't at the time understand how three - three! - washing machines in a row could fail on us. Now we do...

Truth be told, I don't feel so bad for giving cheapo dirtbag salesman such a hard time. I mean the fridge really was befucked. And, as Z pointed out, even the repairman thought all of the washing machines were blown.

But my clothes! I feel cursed. What Egyptian goddess of the outfit did I piss off while we were at Karnak? Or is it a Congolese esprit de costume upset that we bought that wooden statue? What the fuck???

Perhaps it's time to have an exorcism. I think I'll begin by feeding that laundry basket to the goats.