Pants panic

I am having a cow over here.

This morning I was out and about at a ridiculously early hour because I gave someone a ride to work, trying to be helpful. I ended up right by Wal-Mart and was pleasantly wandering about their gardening stuff when Spouse called.

"I fucked up," he said. Well, not too badly: He sent a pen through the washer, and then through the dryer. "All my clothes are ruined," he said. Well, not really.

He made it to work anyway. I surveyed the damage when I got home and it really wasn't that bad. To get at the ink, I started attacking the dryer with all kinds of chemicals. Unfortunately for fire safety, almost everything recommended to work on ink is highly flammable, so the first thing I had to do was unplug the thing.

Hairspray was on the list and seemed to be making the most progress. The first ingredient in hairspray is denatured alcohol, which we happen to have, because the fondue pot that we have yet to use needs it for fuel. Denatured alcohol has all kinds of scary warnings on it, and is a pain in the ass to open, and Lord knows how many brain cells I lost to its powerful fumes, but the stains are now faded such that you'd only see them if you stuck a flashlight in there.

Alas, I have the feeling that is exactly what's going to happen, because I pushed the drum in the wrong direction when I was trying to get at the ink, and it emitted this horrible crunching sound. After a break for ventilation (read: eating cookies and reading David Sedaris), I plugged the dryer back in and hit the button. It heated up but did not spin around. Oh crap.

I think I fucked up worse than Spouse, but he says it's arguable. In lawyerspeak, the actual cause of the dryer not spinning was me pushing it around in ways it did not want to be pushed, but the proximate cause was Spouse leaving the danged pen in his pants pocket.

This is causing a panic for two reasons. The not-so-big-a-deal panic is because Spouse's preferred pants suffered casualties, which means shopping has to happen, and neither of us is a cheerful shopper when it comes to clothes. The full-bore, Oh-My-Golly, sound-the-alarm panic is because the house is a wreck and needs some serious sanitation before the landlord can be called and her handyguy can be dispatched.

Oh, and tomorrow morning I am supposed to leave at oh-dark-thirty so I can make it to Megalopolis for mandatory how-to-be-a-lawyer training, which only the unemployed have to pay for and participate in, and it just makes me really mad. And sad.

I have not heard back about the job I interviewed for, and I strongly suspect that this is what I am really panicking about. That and driving in downtown Megalopolis. Not so much the poor dryer.