The never clean laundry conundrum.

After detailing my flooding of the apartment and Corin's use of the food strainer bag as a Swiffer cloth, I suppose I also have to share our never-clean laundry conundrum. I'm now convinced that after this adventure, we'll have housework down to a science. After about a month of living here, we ran out of the laundry detergent Lucy had left us. We headed out to the store, bought some liquid detergent and didn't give it another thought. After a month of washing clothes, I started to notice that stains weren't coming out and I was having to wash hand towels and dish cloths multiple times to get them smelling fresh. I was getting fairly frustrated that our already inconvenient washer wasn't even doing its job and was to the point of wanting to get an entirely new machine. I couldn't believe the detergent was just that terrible and even tried hand washing a few items to no avail. It never created suds and immediately dissolved in the tap water. I complained to Amy and Jim on Tuesday about just how frustrating it was and how I couldn't believe how anyone had clean clothes in this country. By Wednesday night I was back at our tiny wash basin scrubbing one of my favorite sweaters, attempting to get a stain out that hadn't been eradicated in the laundry. I grumbled and dumped more soap on the fabric, rubbing the cloth together and muttering that there were still no suds even after all I had poured on. Finally, I threw the sweater back in the wash and grabbed the bottle, scrutinizing the label. Then, I saw it. In tiny little letters on the left front side of the label: "Fabric Softener."

*facepalm*

Now, after a late night trip to the drug store on Thursday to pick up what I triple checked was in fact laundry detergent, we have fresh, stain-free laundry. The first time in nearly five weeks. Yes, I used almost an entire family sized bottle of fabric softener in place of detergent. Two things that bother me the most about this. One, knowing that my workout clothes have been rinsed only in water for the last 15 or so runs. Two, we don't even have the excuse that the label was in Japanese. The fabric softener was Downy and the entire label was in English.