I Am a Slow Learner, Part II

Also subtitled, I'm a Complete Idiot Chemist Turned Housewife; or, alternatively, Laundry Disaster Day.

I am generally good at keeping our clothes in a state of acceptable cleanliness, and pride myself on being about to treat tough stains mostly successfully, even when they are a few days old. Remember the old saying, 'pride goeth before a fall'? Well, welcome to my fall.

Today, I decided to do laundry. This was a bad move on my part, I think. Yes, I had a small mountain of laundry, but it was only 2 loads' worth, and could easily have sat happily until Monday, which is the normally designated Laundry Day in this house. I am happy spending Monday moving clothes from washing machine to dryer, and try to get all the stained kids' clothes in the first load so I can re-treat for stains and get them all the way through on successive loads.

However, tonight we have a babysitter coming over, one of our neighbors, and the sin of house pride got to me and I decided I did not want to have a small mountain of dirty clothes sitting in the designated dirty clothes corner in our bedroom, so I moved them to the laundry room. Since I was in there, I figured, hey, let's do the laundry, why not; and proceeded to pile in a bunch of clothes, including a few new hand-me-downs from another neighbor.

I trooped outside with the kiddos and dutifully played with them for an hour when it became clear they were not going to tolerate my foostering around in the veggie patch again, and we came inside and I swooshed off to attend to the laundry, feeling very good at jumping ahead on this chore. So what if the floors need vacuuming? I'll get to that later, let's get this laundry humming. Open washing machine lid, take out clothes...hmmmm, I'm seeing pink...lots of pink. Drat! That new-to-me burgundy cardigan from the neighbor must have run. Yep.

*sigh* Ok, let me see what I've got--I'm pretty sure I've got a color run remover in here somewhere. *rummage, rummage through laundry room cabinets* Aha! Here it is! Oh wait, this is only for one garment...*rummage some more* Aha, thought I had one for the whole (mixed color) load. (Can you see where this is going?)

*scant glance at directions* Ok, hot water, check, let it soak, check...*dump in packet and step back feeling pleased with myself* I wonder what's in this stuff anyway? *more careful glance at ingredients* Sodium hydrosulfite...*trained chemistry brain engages* $#%#@%%!!!!

*opens lid again* Yep, let me see...what damage have I wreaked in the scant one minute of hot water plus strong reducing agent. DD's light pink shirt, now white. I can live with that. My white shirt returning to white from pink...well that's good. DS' new pajama pants, turning from bright green to sickly green-yellow...erg, not so good. Ditto the fire engine new PJ pants. A pale green shirt I wasn't particularly fond of is now a sickly yellow. DH's Yellowstone t-shirt, whose red dye is now splotched with yellow on the side. I'm starting to feel guilty now. My expensive J. Jill silk blend pants...once a beautiful pale aquamarine, now faded with yellow splotches. Ouch.

I stopped the damage tally and decided to remove all colored clothing items from the wash at that point. Well, almost all--I left the PJ pants in because I figured they would look better being homogenously de-colorized, to whatever extent they were not colorfast. And at least DH's dress shirts (2 of them) suffered no ill-effects...apparently they are good colorfast fabrics. I will wash the damaged clothes next, and just live with the results. I might attempt to re-dye the J. Jill pants with some Rit, maybe a darker overall color. But here is yet more evidence that it doesn't matter how educated you are, you can still be a complete doofus idiot at times. *sigh* I should sign this, the Laundry Doofus.