Sock situation

Most people I know have one household chore that stands out among all the others for its potential to make them come completely undone. For me, it's folding socks.

I love doing laundry. I love the smell of laundry detergent and fabric softener and even bleach. I love separating clothes by color and dividing them according to whether they can go in the dryer. I love the nearly immediate gratification of seeing grimy things become clean again with almost no effort on my part. (I would NOT have loved doing laundry 100 years ago.)

I even don't mind folding clothes, for the most part. I'm not the slightest bit compulsive about folding perfectly, which helps. My usual routine is to wash and dry three or four loads in quick succession on Sunday afternoon and then, when everything's dry, dump all of it onto our bed for a massive folding session.

The socks, however, are my nemesis. I use Matt's old socks as cleaning rags/gloves -- which, if you haven't tried it, you should -- and when folding I cannot for the life of me keep straight which ones he still wears and which have been relegated to the rag drawer. Also, the proverbial lost sock is a weekly problem.

My distaste for sorting socks is closely followed by my feelings about unloading the dishwasher. Again, I don't mind washing dishes by hand or loading the dishwasher, but unloading it can put me over the edge. I think this is mostly because our dishwasher is so unreliable.

Usually at least a fourth of the dishes don't get clean, and I've tried all the strategies I can think of -- rinsing first, using different detergents, moving dishes from the top rack to the bottom or vice versa, experimenting with all the wash settings -- it boils down to the fact that our dishwasher is terrible. Just one more reason to look forward to the new house.