Extraordinary things happen to me. Things that don’t happen to everyone else. They happen to our dog, Nora, too. In her case, extraordinary might seem miraculous.
On Monday, as my husband scooped up the dirty tea towels from the end of the kitchen bench like he does every morning on his way to the laundry, a plate escaped from the pile. It clattered onto the bench, bouncing a few times.
“Imagine if you’d thrown the plate into the washing basket with the dirty tea towels,” I said.
Later, as I filled the washing machine, tossing clothes through its door, something strange fell onto the floor. Peering closely at it, I realised it was a pancake. It must have been on the plate under the tea towels.
“Imagine if I’d tossed the pancake into the washing machine,” I said to myself.
When the washing machine cycle had finished, I reached for the wet, clean clothes, and my eyes opened wide. What was wrong with my washing? I peered closely at it and then realised it was covered with bits of pancake. There must have been a whole stack of pancakes on that hidden plate.
How was I to get rid of the mess? Wash everything again? Or would that just redistribute the clinging pancake bits? I took the clothes outside and shook each item vigorously before hanging everything on the line. I hoped the breeze would shake any missed bits loose.
As I was shaking and pegging out the washing, I noticed Nora at my feet. She was wolfing down the pancake that was falling onto the grass. An extraordinary, unexpected breakfast had appeared from the sky. A miracle.
Andy said that evening after dinner, “I’d offer you leftover pancakes for dessert except we don’t have any. They got washed!”
We all laughed, and my daughter offered to make a new batch.
The other day, while walking through the bush with our dogs, I felt a lump in my shoe. A small stone? Was there something wrong with my foot? I continued walking. At various moments during that day, I thought about the lump, but it wasn’t until bedtime that I discovered what it was. A hard, dry pancake pebble was in the foot of my tights.
Maybe it’ll take more than one wash to remove the pancake mess.
The moral of this story: never leave leftover pancakes on the kitchen bench where they can get hidden under a pile of tossed tea towels. Transfer them to the fridge. Or better still, eat them.
So, how do you eat your pancakes? Do you stack them in a pile and add syrup on top? Or do you, like us, pour a little syrup onto each pancake, roll them into cylinders, and then line them up side by side on a plate?
Imagine if the hidden pancakes had been covered with syrup.
Images
Jenny and Quinn in our laundry.
Nora and Quinn in our back garden.
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When I saw that you hang laundry on the line I had to right away tell you I do the very same thing. In the spring, summer, and part of the fall my laundry is outside. But my husband strung clotheslines down in our basement in our wood stove room cuz we heat exclusively with wood so in the winter time I get the benefit of the wood stove drying my clothes. I’ve been doing this for the last definitely over 3 years. As I’ve gotten older and my husband’s gotten older we’ve become more frugal and that’s one of the ways that we save money is by not using our dryer. I also plug my washing machine anywhere from 4 to 5 days a week into a solar generator. So I guess you could say I do laundry completely off grid. And the laundry detergent that I use I get at a deep discount at a store in our area called Ollie’s Which buys Closeouts from other stores.
Nancy,
Oh yes, I hang my washing outside if the weather is dry. We do this to save money, too. And our clothes and bed sheets smell beautiful when they’re dried on the washing line. They smell of sunshine! It’s worth the effort of pegging the clothes onto the line instead of tossing them into the dryer.
I didn’t know that you can plug your washing machine into a solar generator. I will do some research!
Our houses don’t have basements. I wish they did. What a useful part of a house!
Oh yes, the smell is amazing! Yeah portable solar generators are pretty expensive. Ours cost us probably like $600. You’re basically paying a dollar a watt. I think is how it works out something like that. But it is a blessing it does help out to some degree but yeah they’re quite an investment. And what we do is when it kind of gets really low in percentage then I will plug it into some solar panels that we have kind of strategically placed on the back of our garage roof and it sits on top of like a shed right below and it has to have direct sunlight beating on those solar panels for it to charge completely sometimes it takes a couple of days before it will completely charge. But that’s like a unique thing that we do that I guess some people probably have done that as well but I don’t know if a lot have.
Nancy,
Thank you for all the solar generator info. It seems to me that we can save money on our power bills by using solar power, but the equipment to do that is very expensive.
We have a solar hot water system which was installed a few years ago. We haven’t yet saved enough money on our power bills to cover the cost of the solar panels etc. I don’t think we ever will.
I hope your solar generator lasts a long time. They’re a wonderful idea!