Disasters

We had a little string of minor disasters in the fall.

Washing Woes

For the first time in roughly a decade, I had a major laundry dye disaster. Without thinking, I put a green checked tablecloth in a load of light colored laundry, resulting in lots of green clothing. Most of the clothes didn't matter, so my pride is what was damaged the most.

Within the week, another major laundry disaster:

We had allowed our ironing pile to get too large and extra wrinkled, so Joel scooped it up and threw it in the dryer with a damp towel. Unbeknownst to him, he had also scooped up a red crayon and a pink crayon.

Since the ironing pile almost exclusively contained Joel's clothes for work, it was a pretty big laundry disaster.

But thanks to Google and mom blogs, the vast majority of his clothes were salvaged. And I will post the magic mix here in case any of you ever dry your clothes with some crayons:

2 max amounts (line 3) of laundry detergent
1 cup Oxiclean
1/2 cup 20 mule team Borax
1 cup Shout liquid
1 cup white vinegar

The websites I found this remedy on made it sound like one treatment magically got it all out, which wasn't the case for us. We soaked and washed the clothes probably five or six times, rubbing the stains by hand with Zout in between washes. I can't say it was a miracle cure; a couple of the shirts and pants were ruined, and some of the salvaged clothes still have a couple of little spots. But all in all, I am grateful most of the clothes were okay.

Bad News Bites

Back when I was working on Halloween costumes, I couldn't find the yellow rib knit that I needed. So, inspired by all the wild sunflowers that I'd seen around town, I hatched a plan to naturally dye some white rib knit yellow.

I ventured out to collect the flowers and found quite the cache of flowers. They were all on the edge of a ditch, and I was only wearing flip-flops, so sometimes I was standing kind of precariously. Walking around in the brush, I kept getting scratched and stuff, so when I felt some prickles on my feet, I didn't think much of it. But the prickles kept increasing, so I looked down and found that I was standing right on an anthill. I brushed them off, but they had managed to crawl around between my toes and under the straps of my sandals, so it took a while to dislodge all the ants. At this point, I just brushed them off and didn't give them a second thought. But by the time I made it back home, the bites were burning, and I finally gave my foot a good look.

I think there were about 12 bites; many of the worst ones were between my toes, so they are harder to see. Just a word of advice: don't stand on an anthill. The bites hurt a lot more than I expected, and they kept hurting for days and days; they itched for weeks. Many of them got all swollen and pus-filled...it was gross. Disaster.

Photo Fiasco

You may have noticed that many of my recent pictures have gray bars across them. Somehow, my memory card corrupted and resulted in lost data on almost every picture. There weren't any major losses, but it was still very disappointing. Most of them can be cropped easily:

But some of them just won't work:




For some reason, the thumbnails show the entire photo, but the actual files are missing data. I reformatted my memory card, and now all is well.

So. Disasters abounded. But if bad things were going to happen, it wasn't too bad.