My Dryer is BLEEDING!

So, in keeping with the theme of my life...

I've been taking a class on finances, and I've recently started buying things in bulk to save pennies wherever I can. I switched laundry detergent to the cheapest one I could find in the largest container (300 fluid ounces to be exact). I patiently waited until my old soap was gone, and yesterday I proudly opened my new container and washed ONE load of the 96 promised on the label.

Late last night I went in to fold the last load of the day to put an end to the nightmare "beep beep beep" I'd been hearing ALL day long. I thought as I walked down the hall, "Wow, that new detergent really smells good...a little strong, but good." Then I saw it. The entire floor of my laundry room was green. I mean every single square inch...oozing into the heat duct, under both machines, seeping across the threshhold onto the hardwood floors. 300 fluid ounces of detergent, minus the 6 ounces I had used in that first load. The dryer had VIBRATED the container onto the floor. There were pieces of the broken plastic lid swimming across the shiny surface of the soap lake. Like any good mother, I bawled. I cried like a little girl, great hiccups of the child not wanting a shot, the sobs and wails of a grocery line temper tantrum, and tears like a river...over the lenses of my glasses, down my face, snot running freely into my mouth and down the pajamas I'd never taken off that day.

My husband held me and rocked me as if I were a child woken up by a scary dream. My teenage daughters burst forth from their basement room to see which pet had suddenly died. My toddler (who had taken a nap FAR to late in the afternoon to consider sleep before midnight) patted my head and told me over and over, "I can fick it Mama, I have shtrong mushels" while she flexed her tiny arm like a mini Popeye-the-sailor-man. And the little men of the house...slept blissfully through it all.

Post mortem: I was under the gun to find a missing receipt for the new dishwasher that was being repaired today. Find the receipt, prove it is still under warranty, no charge. No receipt, $300 plus 2 service calls. I did not have time for this kind of mess. So my hubby went in for disaster relief, and I ventured into the black hole of my office for search and rescue of the receipt. Next, I heard my husband swear...not a usual thing at all. Then he came in and showed me his hand and arm covered in green soap at least halfway up to his elbow. This was from sticking his hand down the vent. Apparently, the laundry room vent curves "just right" so rather than allowing the soap to gush down and flood the entire system, it was captured in this dip...6 inches deep.

So he scooped. Into a giant bowl. In addition to nearly 2 LITERS of soap (as proven by the markers on the inside of my mixing bowl), he retrieved one dead spider, several chunks of dog food, one cricket corpse, one icky gooey dryer sheet, 2 pennies, grit of varying shapes and sizes, and a giant glob of soggy mushy slop that could only be regular old lint mixed with wads of dog hair and drenched in thick green soap. "Do you want me to try to save it?" he inquired. "What? Are you crazy!? I don't know! Sniff! Sniff! I don't care! Honk honk (nose blowing)." What was he thinking you ask? He was thinking that maybe he could recoup some of the $26 investment I'd been boo-hooing about, and that perhaps I would use it to "clean our clothes". HUH?

Eventually he declared the cleanup complete, and I had finally recovered the receipt. SUCCESS! Time for bed. Another night lost to the urgencies of the household rather than spent cuddling and talking to each other and remembering all the things we loved about each other. (Yeah, right.) Sleep, sleep, sleep. Five minutes later, the alarm went off. Four kids had to get ready for school, the dishwasher guy was supposed to be coming sometime between the hours of 7am and 5pm, husband overslept AGAIN, and one teenager was on the verge of missing the bus. 30 minutes later, 5 people went out the door, and 1 baby was still sleeping (phew!)

Time to do the laundry. Remember the guy in the old Dunkin' Donuts ads? Time to make the donuts? He ran into himself coming and going from his store when it was still dark out. Yeah, that's me. Every day. Fat, old lady wakes up and heads down to the laundry room, bleary-eyed, but prepared to fulfill her responsibilities to "do the laundry". Day in, day out. Time to do the laundry. Time to do the laundry.

But wait! The strong chemical soapy smell is still there. Can you believe this??? MY DRYER IS BLEEDING! From under the machine during the too-short night, a massive puddle of green blood has pooled. I guess the cleanup was not so complete after all. But am I going to complain? Call my husband in outrage? Not after he cut his hand on some mystery metal and got a bloody nose during cleanup...probably from his nasal passages being eaten away by the chemical soup. But, this is crazy! Soap still oozing from beneath the dryer? I can't face cleaning it up. So, as any resilient mother would do, I scooped up the load of teenager's jeans (the ones that were BOUGHT all scuffed up and ratty) and dragged them through the soap. I took the little boy's jeans with Georgia red clay on the knee and swept it under the edge where the blood was coming from. Dumped it all in the washer and turned it on. DONE!

Then, despite my earlier misgivings, I went to my mixing bowl and filtered out the dog hair, grit, bugs and other junk with a brand new kitchen-screen-strainer-thingie, and "saved" nearly 2 liters of the cheap, green laundry detergent. How about that!?