The Plain Facts Of The Matter

Tracey walked into our laundry and stopped.

“What are you doing?” she asked me.

“What do you think I’m doing?” I responded over my shoulder sarcastically.

It wasn’t a brainteaser. I was putting a couple of loads of washing into our machines and had just scooped in some powder.

“What I think is you’re about to stuff up our washing machines,” she told me.

And she was right. But in my defense if I’d known the following three things it wouldn’t have been on the cards.

Unknown fact number one

Tracey and a group of her friends head out once a month to share a meal and a few drinks and, I’m assuming, skite about why their husbands are better than everyone else’s. For shits and giggles they decided to have a theme this time and dressed up as old ladies. But I was unaware (Tracey says, “you were not unaware, you’d forgotten!”) that tonight was the night they were going out.

Unknown fact number two

Tracey takes dressing up very seriously. A photo I posted earlier in the week of Y-fronts at a local op shop was taken while Tracey sourced just the right outfit. I’ll mention at this point she was a little disconcerted to discover her ‘costume’ was actually a far more comfortable dress to wear than any in her wardrobe. Also, she bought the Y-fronts to give to the other ‘grannies’ with an Easter egg because, ‘grannies always give socks and undies as presents’. All this I knew. But it would have helped if I’d known she was going to put flour in her hair and apply wet flour to her face (for that flakey ‘my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be’ complexion).

Unknown fact number three

We keep the washing powder and the flour in exactly the same sort of container, and Tracey had done her makeup in the bathroom. I mean I know about the containers, but I didn’t know Tracey had moved the flour into the bathroom to do her face.

So what I’d just done was to scoop half a cup of flour into each of our two machines. And I know what happens when you mix flour and water because when I was at kindy some weeks we couldn’t afford Clag.

Tracey did a magnificent eyeroll and took the flour container out of my hands.

“Well how was I supposed to know?” I said defensively as I began to tug on the washing machine tray to see if it would come out or if I was going to need a spoon.

Tracey turned the container around.

You know, my defense would have been a much stronger argument had ‘Self Raising Flour’ not been written very clearly on the side.

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“Raising a family on little more than laughs”