I have a friend who is highly successful in the cut-throat world of television journalism. She looks like a supermodel and has an on camera demeanour of someone wholesome and pure. We are not friends because of these reasons, but because she is funny as all fuck and very very quick witted.
I quite like going out with her. We get approached by people saying "Sandra Sully can I have your autograph?". which is fine, except she is not Sandra Sully.
She is generous to a fault.
A few years back she was covering the Olympic Games in China and was away for a while. I was put in charge of finding her a new place to live as she had recently required a lovely new beau and they were going to co-habitate and her collection of shoes now required their own room. Scary and big responsibility.
Anyway, she bought me an antique white king size bed-spread as a thank you and carried it all over China. I was gleeful and extremely snatchy with this gift when she gave it too me. It spends it's winters with me in my boudoir, and it's summers in a storage box with moth balls. It is better cared for than anything else in Woogsworld.
So I pulled it out a few weeks ago and decided it needed a freshen up before I put it to use. Back in 1997, Mr Woog and I invested in a 5.5 kilo washing machine as we only did a load or two a week. On a Saturday. You see it was small as it needed to fit onto the cupboard we had which constituted our laundry. Of course this is before the boys came along. Since then it could have earned enough Frequent Flyer Points to take all the Woogs around the world first class several times.
I lovingly placed the bedspread in and turned on the machine. I made the fatal error of leaving the house. On my return, the machine was shitting itself, the laundry was flooded and the air was filled with a smell I could only describe as what would happen if electricity and fire met, with water.
An hour later, after it took me that long to assume I was not going to electrocute myself while getting the bedspread out of the machine, I was headed to the dry cleaners. I had called Neville from Fisher and Paykel and he was on his way.
So total cost was $45 for dry cleaning and $260 for call out to serviceman and parts.
Last night, I made my bed with the bed-spread. It looked amazing! It was whiter than white and they had gotten the smell out of it. I stood back and admired it.
The door to my bedroom was then flung open and the Wooglettes Kamikaze jumped on it with a mouth covered in chocolate paddle pop. They both face planted. They looked up at me. "Sorry Mum,".
$305 dollars so far..... and anther trip back to the dry cleaners.
