Wash Day Blues

Thursday 9th March 2012

Today is International Women’s Day and we have a day off school.  Hoorah!  How am I going to celebrate this wonderful day?  Doing the washing!  Martin bless him has been doing the laundry because I have not been able to wring out clothes but I discovered last week that I can now do this when without thinking wrung out socks because they were dripping all over the lounge floor.  So with great gusto I organised an assembly line of hot water bucket filling and cold water bottle filling to maximise the amount of water we could store before the water cut off at 10.30.  But you know what?  Because it was a special day they let us lady folk have an extra ½ hour of water time.  Who ever said that women have a hard time of it here in Georgia?!

Because it is freezing cold in the shower room as soon as you turn on the shower it is like a steam room. 
We started panicking that the water would run out so we started to fill buckets while the twin-tub-without-the-twin chug-chugged.

It was the first properly sunny day for two centuries and so Martin peeled back the plastic double glazing so that we could access the washing lines from inside the apartment through the window. We were working as a tag team, hanging out the washing from both windows at the same time and Martin – as enthusiastic as ever – thought he could treat the lines as if they were on pulleys and not manky old rope strung round two rusty old metal pipes.  Consequently, the barely held together washing line broke dramatically under the strain of our PJs and fell to the floor. I was rendered speechless but my face said “What on earth possessed you to imagine for one brief moment that you could tug a Georgian washing line with 500 weight of wet washing on it without it giving up the will to live????”  Actually speech returned fairly quickly after the initial shock and my face was no longer required. 

Martin fixed the rope by tying many, many scout knots which has in fact stood the test of time – well at least until the next time.   Look! I am a proper Georgian Housewife!