I Hate Pens

I hate pens. I really, really do. Now you are thinking, "But Michelle, pens are inanimate objects. Why must you have such strong feelings towards something that has nothing against you?"

And you would be WRONG! Because I am totally convinced that pens absolutely, positively, exist just to make me stark, raving mad.

First, in my household, you can never, ever find one. My poor husband has brought home pen after pen, after pen. With a cry in his throat he will ask me, "Where are my pens?" I don't know honey. Ask the kids. Or look in the cracks of the car seats. I think there are several hundred, stashed by children doing their homework on the way to school.

But the reason why I really, really hate them. I hate them because they show up in my laundry, unnoticed, hiding even, not to be found until they have ruined an entire load of WHITES in the dryer! It happened again yesterday. I don't know how it got in there but I bent down to get the laundry out and I immediately saw it. You know what I am talking about, the blue horrid streaks on the back of the inside of your dryer, it is like the pen mocking you. You haven't seen what it has done to your laundry yet, but it just told you in no uncertain terms that it was there. With a vengeance.

My hubby was happily making us a nice, bubbly, fall dinner. And from the belly of the beast he begins to hear his wife swearing like a sailor in a saloon. I mean, how many freakin, farfignoogin times is this gonna happen to me? Argh. I try so hard to not let this happen. I take the time to shake out each piece of laundry as I put it in the dryer. But they hide. Oh, they hide.

"Why don't you check all the pockets before placing them in the washing machine", you may ask me. Well, Martha Stewart, I do laundry for ten people!!! I would have to live in my basement to do that. The children would get hungry. The husband would get lonely.

"Why don't you tell them to empty their pockets?". Because these are people who will stand in front of the laundry shoot and leave their clothes and unmentionables on the floor in front of the shoot. They are not capable of checking their pockets.

Besides, that would be useless. Pens have it out for me. I think they wait until I am up the stairs and jump into the machine after I leave. They are willing to die, have all of their blood taken out of them just to hear me say things I will have to confess later.

But I have the last laugh, all of their dead carcasses lie for months in my large garbage bin, with lint balls, and the old moldy food the cats stashed down there so I wouldn't see what they were eating, and the stained old clothes. Then when it is full, off they go with the garbage men in the sky. To be annihilated and melted into nothingness. Ha. Or maybe left next to a gramma's rotting garbage and the bag of diapers stinking in the sun.

Oh, I can think of all kinds of nasty things that should happen to those fiendish things that cause me to suffer so. But I need to go finish the laundry.

Does anyone know how to get pen stains off the back of a dryer?