I Hate Laundry

I hate laundry.

It's not the washing -- even though two loads in a U.S.-style washing machine equals four or five loads in our teeny tiny Euro-style machine -- or the folding, or even in the putting away. (Of course, I rarely put the laundry away any more, as my lack of proper folding skills tends to result in Shelly refolding most of what I've done, anyway.)

It's that we live nine stories above the streets below. (Our address says we live on the seventh floor, but with Hong Kong's European style of floor numbering -- where the floor at street level is generally called "ground" and the floor above street level is "one" -- and hills -- where buildings frequently end up with floors below ground level -- we're actually nine stories up.) It's enough to make a guy miss a big, sprawling clothesline in the backyard.

You see, in order to hang our laundry out to dry -- there's no dryer in our apartment -- I am required to lean out a 12-inch gap in the window, pull a 12-foot, plastic-covered bamboo pole into our one-butt kitchen, prop one end of the pole on the window sill and the other on the counter and, finally, clip the wet laundry onto the pole.


That's not the tricky part, of course. Neither, technically, is picking up the pole, bunching up the sheets or shirts or towels or whatever enough to move them over the window sill, lean back out the 12-inch gap and replace the pole on its holder. The tricky part, as we have discovered on separate occasions, is doing all of that while managing to not knock the poles which are already outside out of their holder and to the street nine stories below.

Perhaps the worst part of the whole thing is that the poles are too long to fit in the lift, so after retrieving the fallen one, you get to enjoy a nine story climb back to the apartment.