Still Polly

“Quick! Mute it! Mute it now!” Bob and I both scrambled for the remote, and he managed to hit the mute button just before my seething rant could start up again. “I can’t stand that commercial,” I said for the bo-billionth time. And he agrees with me. There are no good TV commercials anymore. One could argue that there never were any good TV commercials. But I think we can all agree that there was a time when television commercials were effective—sometimes even funny—and possibly even worth the money the brand spent on their creation and placement. Not anymore. David Ogilvy, where are you when we need you?

 Some days it is like Jesus is taking a nap on a cushion in the back of my boat while it is filling up with water and I’m sinking fast. Or it’s just the laundry room floor filling up with water and my hopes are sinking fast. Which happens like clockwork every winter for the last eight years. A frozen drain pipe. Sometimes frozen water pipes. But either way, it ends the same. I’m in tears, knee-deep in wet clothes, and trying to figure out when I will be able to make it to the laundromat. Over the years we developed a strategy for coping with the annual drain pipe freeze. If the weather predicts anything below 20 degrees for more than a day, we shift into Emergency Laundry Mode. That means I do as much laundry as possible in as little time as possible. A completely empty hamper is the goal. If I can get the clothes off our backs into the machine before the cold hits, I do that. When it’s all clean, dry, folded, and put away. I high-five myself. That is until one article of clothing ...