An unsatisfying resolution

[simont]

I've not been posting here in a while, and it seems to me that one reason why not is that I increasingly don't feel as if I have the brain-space to put together a long and well thought-out post about anything.

Perhaps, therefore, I should begin to fix this by posting short and/or inconsequential things. To kick off with, here's one that is both.

I lost a sock the other week. I did it in the way you normally lose socks: at one time I had N socks, and at a time considerably later I had N-1, and there were a lot of things that happened in between, so I don't know which was responsible.

(That's what makes the sock lost, of course – if I could narrow down to one event, I could have just gone and got the sock back from wherever that one happened.)

I looked for it everywhere, and it didn't turn up. I resigned myself to having only N-1 of those socks – until I did the laundry yesterday, and found that when I came to hang everything up, I inexplicably had N of them again.

So I found the sock in the same way as I lost it: I don't know what thing I did caused it to reappear.

That's the worst way to find a sock. The problem is solved, but in a way that sheds no light on the mystery! Arrrgh!

Comments

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I vry much sympathise with the first sentence :( I have a long list of interesting post topics I never have the mental energy to write up.

Our socks (and toddler T-shirts, and sometimes even adult T-shirts) get lost in the corners of pillowcases and duvet covers. If that happened, it's plausible it came back out again next time it went through the wash.

[gerald_duck]

Yes! Pillowcases and duvet covers.

Personally — and I should prefix this by saying I'm not obsessive-compulsive, honest — I seem to have devised a system where I wash seven "units" of laundry at a go. One unit is t-shirt+pants+socks or a sweatshirt. Jeans, duvet cover, or fitted sheet+two pillowcases are each two units.

This means I know if something's gone missing between loading and unloading the washing machine, and invariably I find it in a duvet case. Or not: having got frustrated at how things trapped in a duvet case didn't get rinsed or spun properly, I now wash duvet cases done up and the problem has gone away.

[siderea]

*takes notes*