Laundry Day

So we do a lot of laundry.  A lot.  With four people usually going through two outfits a day on average (what with play clothes, work clothes, cleaning clothes)  it all adds up.  I kept reading little blurbs that said to save energy, save the world, save the dolphins (okay I made that up) you should hang your laundry every once in a while and enjoy some free energy from the sun.  Made sense to me, and I was mulling over the idea and even mentioned it to the whole family while we were in Big Bear and decided, yeah, when I get back, I'll buy a little rack and dry the clothes at least once a week on there.  And then we got back from Big Bear.  With at least three loads of laundry.  Dirty dirty laundry.  It involved a lot of dirt, some sand and even some car sickness.  So I did a load of laundry.  Popped it in the dryer.  Went to take it out of the dryer.  And found my laundry as cold and damp as when I had thrown it in there.  No heat.  My hallway piled thigh high with laundry and my dryer has no heat.  Well thats annoying, but its happened before and my handy Pops fixed it in fifteen minutes.  So we'll wait for Papa.  We still had clean clothes.  So Papa made it over to the house on Saturday and we replaced the part we replaced before, and...no heat.  Papa declared it out of his realm of knowledge and time to head to the Home Depot for a new dryer.   But the problem with our dryer being broke is that we are too.  So a drying rack and some clothes pins it is till next payday or two.   Today was my first attempt at life without a dryer.  Now I know some of you reading this are thinking you had to do this all the time, you had no other option.  But for spoiled lil' me, hanging laundry is one of those quaint "roughing it" things you do when you're camping.  Like showering under a bag of water and peeing under a pine tree.  Not completely foreign to me, but definitely a change of pace.  Here's what I learned about au natural laundry today:  Unless I go back to Target for two more racks or figure out a way to hook up a line to my vinyl fencing, I need to seriously decrease the amount of clothing in each load.  I loaded up that little rack ("27' of hanging space!" the box proclaims) for all its worth and still was not able to hang half of my load of the kid's laundry (I shudder to think how long a load of towels is going to take me).  Also decided socks are the most annoying things in the world.  In the world.  Especially tiny ones balled up into damp little knots of cotton.  Impossible to detangle and ridiculously time consuming to hang.  Also, never try to hang laundry while both kids are awake and have nothing better to do than pester you with a million requests and try their hardest to step in dog poop, try to get bitten by a black widow or trip you as you reach for more laundry.  I'm seriously contemplating asking my across the way neighbor if I can hook up a line between my house and his on a pulley, so I can go Italian alleyway style.  That seems so much more romantic.  Wonder how the association would feel about that...