You Wanna Put it Where?

Ever since the laundry fiasco, the captain has been obsessed about getting a washer and dryer for the boat. He’ll wake up at 4 AM and start researching them online. When we come home at night, the first thing he does is get the tape measure and start measuring areas in the forward cabin, near the bathroom. He’s ready to pull out the counter, cut into the closet, destroy the drawers beneath the bunk. Last weekend when we visited Jill and Scott, they spent all afternoon discussing where it could go. Mind you, they weren’t on the boat – this was all hypothetical. Call it a visualization exercise.

Tonight I’m sitting in my bathroom when I hear Mark just outside with the tape measure. “I think I found a spot,” he says. “In the engine room, where the litter box is. We’d have to find another place for the litter.”

“Are you really going to do this,” I call out to him.

“What – don’t you want it?”

I think for a second. A washer/dryer combo is expensive, bulky, troublesome to install, and quite frankly, I don’t think it’s going to really wash and dry our clothes. There are a million Laundromats in this city. For a drive across the State of Illinois or Michigan, we can do our laundry for free.

“No,” I decide. “It’s not worth the hassle.”

“I just like thinking about where it would go,” Mark says.

I don’t entirely believe him. He has an intensity of thought and a singleness of purpose that is admirable, but could also result in a huge washer/dryer sitting in the middle of the salon, too big to fit anywhere on the boat, reducing our 12 feet of living space to ten. Oh, when you live on a project....