Doing the laundry in summer.

Yikes it has been hot lately. Every day it has been over 95 degrees and sometimes over 100. Thank goodness for unemployment and the beach!

One bizarre, almost Pavlovian, impulse I get whenever it gets really hot is to do the laundry. Perhaps it is not so bizarre. With the ambient temperature so high the clothes will dry more quickly. It drives me crazy when our clothes take forever to dry during rainy days.

You see, we don’t have a clothes dryer. I don’t know anyone who does. In this hot climate the suggestion that we need a machine that heats up clothes to dry them when it is already 90 degrees outside just draws blank stares from people.

So we hang our clothes to dry from the ceiling of the utility room, like everyone else. When in Brazil…

Forgive me if I actually miss having a clothes dryer. Sometimes I need a piece of clothing before it dries completely on its own. Dryers REALLY cut down on the need to iron out wrinkles. And that handy lint screen in your dryer keeps the little fuzzies off everything. Small things, I know, but they are also weekly realities.

We could actually buy a dryer. The big appliance stores sometimes have one (one!) for sale. But they are almost always electric and electricity is really expensive. And the sticker price for a teeny tiny dryer is shocking.

So I just pop in my iPod headphones and hang up our clothes while listening to Rachel Maddow.