The Washing Machine has Died a Tragic Death.

This morning I got up, determined to have a productive and busy day. So me and my foolish optimism changed the sheets and put some blankets into the washer and put some pillows in the dryer with some dryer sheets so they would stop smelling like drool and hair and then went about my day.

Until that is, the washer started making that noise.

Now, when you are like me, and have a somewhat limited but pretty functional knowledge of how machines work, there is a sound. I cannot really describe this sound. It is, quite frankly the sound a motor makes when it is trying to turn but can't. It is the sound of death. A machine death rattle if you will. If you here this sound and ignore it, you will burn out the motor. Which in every day speak means that the motor is dead and is never ever coming back to life and you might as well bury it in the yard and get another one.

So when the washer began making that sound I am fairly sure that I must have teleported over to it and jerked the lid up. It looked like it was refusing to go into spin cycle. Great. Whoo hoo. I lowered the lid once, only to hear it make the sound again. Then I summoned Scott. He turned off the machine and pulled it forward. We looked at the back with flashlights. There appeared to be no way to get into the inside of it where the broken things were. Finally I had to tilt the whole machine up and hold it there while he poked around underneath.*Scott admitted nothing looked immediately broken. So I did what I always do when confronted with a problem.

I went to the Internet.

The Internet told me it was probably a bad direct drive coupling. I ordered a new drive coupler from Lowes. Then I had to deal with the problem of the blankets that were still sitting in the washer, in about six inches of water that was still in the machine.

First of all I couldn't just put them in the dryer because dryers aren't made to handle that kind of thing and two the blankets were still sopping dripping wet. I also learned that wet blankets are about fifty times heavier then dry blankets. I decided to throw both blankets out onto the deck railing and let god sort them out. Except that the way my tiny mobile home hallway works, I have to pass the back door, walk into the bedroom, turn around and then open the door, because that's just how that motherfucker swings.

Which meant that the blanket had plenty of time to pee on me.

And the hallway. And the carpet. And there were two blankets which meant I did this twice. Then of course I left them for a bit to run most of the water out. Which seemed like a good plan until I got back out there to transfer them to the clothes line and found that they had frozen into giant slabs of blanket.

I hung them on the clothes line anyway, feeling like an idiot for having to forcibly bend the tops down to clip them. If you are wondering why I didn't hang them up inside the answer is mobile home, there is nowhere in this particle board wonderland that could even think about supporting two wet as hell blankets, let alone being water proof enough to hang them above.

Which is pretty much how I wound up with icicles hanging from my blankets.

I finally caved and then brought them inside where I let them unthaw on top of the washer and then stuffed them in the dryer and prayed I didn't burn that out too. Once they had mostly dried I pulled them out and draped on my living room chairs so they could remind me of my failures.

Also at this point I realized that I didn't know if it was the three dryer sheets I had put in the dryer with the pillows were making the blankets smell and feel like that or whether the soap was never rinsed out of them.

It's like a guessing game where there are no right answers.

So if anyone needs me, I'll just be smelling my blankets and trying desperately not to think about the fact that my bath towel smells really weird and there's not a goddamn thing I can do about it.

Fuck.

*If there was ever a greater trust exercise...