How I Spent My Saturday Night

I knew something was up when I came home late in the afternoon and my mom said, “Sooo, I have a question for you: How would you like to go shopping for a new dryer?”

Considering that when I had left the house earlier in the day, our dryer was fine as far as I knew, it struck me as a bit of an odd question.

It turns out my mom had unwittingly left a black wax pencil in one of her pants’ pockets and then proceeded to wash and dry the thing. It also turns out that while a black wax pencil can make it through a gently spinning cold wash cycle relatively in place, intact and totally undetected, that’s not the case once it reaches the inside of a warm dryer where it bounces up, down and all around.

My poor, unsuspecting mom opened the dryer to find that her load of laundry was covered in black spots and streaks. So was the inner bin of the dryer, as well as the inside of the dryer door. At first she thought the dryer had somehow sprung a major oil leak. Then when she stopped to consider that the dryer doesn’t function via oil-lubed engine, she went searching for other possibilities. And found the stub of the wax pencil.

After some frantic, but unsuccessful, attempts to wipe the interior clean she decided it would just be easier to buy a new dryer.

But it turns out that I’m cheap. Or, more accurately, that I don’t see the need to spend $500 on a new dryer when I could put that money toward an oh-so-much-more-fun IVIg infusion instead. (More on that in a later post.) So after a few unsuccessful attempts of my own to rid the dryer’s insides of its new paint job, including blasting the waxy film with steam from my hand-held clothes steamer, I came up with a question of my own: “What would Heloise do?”

I have a 2-inch-thick Hints From Heloise book that could be useful if I took it upon myself to actually, ahem, clean every once in a while. My mom cracked it open. It recommended something like WD-40, which we weren’t sure was such a terrific idea, but it did spark another thought: Avon’s Skin So Soft product, which apparently not only softens skin but also manages to remove waxy residue from enamel-coated surfaces.

So I spent Saturday evening laying on the laundry room floor, giving the dryer a more thorough cleaning than any of our other appliances are likely to see in their lifetimes. And as an extra bonus, our clothes smell oh-so-soft.