Laundry and Peeing All Over Everything.

This morning I woke up at a little before 7 from a dream in which I was spraying urine all over everything in somebody's house and couldn't stop. I pulled the skin of my penis up over the top and pinched it to try to stop the flow but it just turned into a fine mist. I thought if I could get the spray fine enough and keep moving so as not to spray too much in any one place, maybe no one would notice. But the finer the mist, the longer I kept peeing, all over a couch, chairs, a table, the floor.

In some of these drug trials, they collect your urine for a given period of time. Every drop of it. They send you into the bathroom with a plastic container and you drop it off on the way out. And then during that period, there are specific times at which you have to produce at least 40 ml of urine. We're always drinking lots of water anyway, to keep hydrated, which makes the blood draws easier, so we're peeing often, but still we have to be aware of the time and not empty our bladders too soon before those times when they want the 40 ml.

So when I woke up at 7, I had to pee but I knew I had to pee again at 8:10 and I was worried that if I peed at 7, I might not have to go again at 8:10, at least not 40 ml worth.

I was a bed-wetter when I was a kid, and usually the way it happened was that I would dream I was peeing and wake up to find that I actually had. It was a big deal when I started to wake up from those dreams not having wet the bed. I still fairly often have dreams of urinating in inappropriate places. And I still wake up extremely relieved that the bed is dry and I still have to go.

Which leads me to laundry. J and I got a washing machine a few weeks ago. Though trips to the laundromat have not been as onerous the last few years, now that I have so few clothes, still it's nice to be free of that. And I'm happy that we're air-drying our clothes, which is a big energy savings.

But it's been an adjustment for me. I was never one to separate laundry. I just threw it all in there, rugs, underwear, towels, t-shirts, everything. And it all came out clean. White t-shirts didn't stay white very long, but that didn't matter so much to me. Even the plastic shower curtain liner came out sparkling.

Not so with the our new washing machine. All my black pants and t-shirts came out with splotches of white powder from the soap and fuzzy lint from the towels. And my white t-shirts weren't just dingy, they had brown stains that weren't there when I threw them in. I tried the "extra rinse" feature and the "extra spin." I tried the "heavy duty" cycle. Same thing. For a while, I was washing all my dark clothes twice, the second time with no soap, just to rinse out the white spots.

Of course, J's laundry comes out fine. He separates, and that's what I'm going to start doing. Not just lights from darks, but towels from everything, to avoid the fuzz. I still don't know how he avoids the white powder problem. I've switched to liquid detergent, and I'm not happy about it because it costs more.