Laundry Shop Quotes

You don’t need fashion designers when you are young. Have faith in your own bad taste. Buy the cheapest thing in your local thrift shop - the clothes that are freshly out of style with even the hippest people a few years older than you. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership. Ill-fitting is always stylish. But be more creative - wear your clothes inside out, backward, upside down. Throw bleach in a load of colored laundry. Follow the exact opposite of the dry cleaning instructions inside the clothes that cost the most in your thrift shop. Don’t wear jewelry - stick Band-Aids on your wrists or make a necklace out of them. Wear Scotch tape on the side of your face like a bad face-lift attempt. Mismatch your shoes. Best yet, do as Mink Stole used to do: go to the thrift store the day after Halloween, when the children’s trick-or-treat costumes are on sale, buy one, and wear it as your uniform of defiance.

But this isn’t just sex for me, Rachel,” Jake adds, his face solemn. “Hell, at this point, I’ll settle for just breathing your air. I’ll rub your feet on the couch after a long day. I’ll do your laundry. I’ll hold your purse while you shop for trail mix. That’s how crazy I am about you. I have to be me, and this is who I am. This is how I feel. Move in and be with me. With us. Whatever that looks like to you, we’ll figure it out. Just give me more than this nothing. I can’t bear another second of the nothing.

It was like walking through a scene from an Italian movie. The street was lined with clothing stores and little coffee shops and restaurants, and people kept calling to one another from windows and cars. Halfway down the street a horn beeped politely and everyone cleared out of the street to make way for an entire family crowded onto a scooter. There was even a string of laundry hanging between two buildings, a billowy red housedress flapping right in the middle of it. Any second now a director was going to jump out and yell, Cut!

The things we need most are the things we have become most afraid of, such as adventure, intimacy, and authentic communication. We avert our eyes and stick to comfortable topics. We hold it as a virtue to be private, to be discreet, so that no one sees our dirty laundry. We are uncomfortable with intimacy and connection, which are among the greatest of our unmet needs today. To be truly seen and heard, to be truly known, is a deep human need. Our hunger for it is so omnipresent, so much apart of our life experience, that we no more know what it is missing than a fish knows it is wet. We need more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption — anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen or known, or at least see and know ourselves.

look, mate, it’s a job, the making of cakes and the washing of sheets, the coordination of laundry with PE lessons, the handling of the Christmas shopping and the girls’ dental appointments, and the fact that your wife does it on top of her paid work without you noticing does not make you clever.

In New York the Fifth Avenue Lingerie Shop is on Madison Avenue, the Madison Pet Shop is on Lexington Avenue, the Park Avenue Florist is on Madison Avenue, and the Lexington Hand Laundry is on Third Avenue. New York is the home of 120 pawnbrokers, and it is where Bishop Sheen's brother, Dr. Sheen, shares an office with one Dr. Bishop.

pretend I am equal while I am: walking the dog/doing the grocery shopping/waiting in the orthodontist’s/commiserating about mean teens/folding laundry. I pretend I am equal when I am chopping vegetables/organising the counsellor or the hospital or the solicitor/de-griming the fridge. Actually, I mind none of it. This is my real life, with my real loves. I know that when I’m old I’ll envy my younger self her busyness, her purpose, her big-hearted whirligig life. But still, the distribution of labour is hard to make equal, because so much of it is hard to see, wrapped up in the definition of what it is to be me.

Imp froze as he rounded the corner onto Regent Street, and saw four elven warriors shackling a Santa to a stainless-steel cross outside Hamleys Toy Shop.

So my life has come to this: all I ever make is laundry. Awake or asleep, I'm always shuffling round some shopping mall, raking through knitwear carousels that whirl into infinity, searching, with the fever or teething gums, for the ultimate cardigan. Is it any wonder the wardrobe's bursting, the linen basket overflowing like an archive of disproved hypotheses? The grey bras, the shrinking T-shirts, that embarrassed puddle of lycra, my favourite dress -- now ruined dress -- my lost remembered, perfect dress: all laundry, in the end. More laundry.

The breakdown of the neighborhoods also meant the end of what was essentially an extended family....With the breakdown of the extended family, too much pressure was put on the single family. Mom had no one to stay with Granny, who couldn't be depended on to set the house on fire while Mom was off grocery shopping. The people in the neighborhood weren't there to keep an idle eye out for the fourteen-year-old kid who was the local idiot, and treated with affection as well as tormented....So we came up with the idea of putting everybody in separate places. We lock them up in prisons, mental hospitals, geriatric housing projects, old-age homes, nursery schools, cheap suburbs that keep women and the kids of f the streets, expensive suburbs where everybody has their own yard and a front lawn that is tended by a gardener so all the front lawns look alike and nobody uses them anyway....the faster we lock them up, the higher up goes the crime rate, the suicide rate, the rate of mental breakdown. The way it's going, there'll be more of them than us pretty soon. Then you'll have to start asking questions about the percentage of the population that's not locked up, those that claim that the other fifty-five per cent is crazy, criminal, or senile. WE have to find some other way....So I started imagining....Suppose we built houses in a circle, or a square, or whatever, connected houses of varying sizes, but beautiful, simple. And outside, behind the houses, all the space usually given over to front and back lawns, would be common too. And there could be vegetable gardens, and fields and woods for the kids to play in. There's be problems about somebody picking the tomatoes somebody else planted, or the roses, or the kids trampling through the pea patch, but the fifty groups or individuals who lived in the houses would have complete charge and complete responsibility for what went on in their little enclave. At the other side of the houses, facing the, would be a little community center. It would have a community laundry -- why does everybody have to own a washing machine?-- and some playrooms and a little cafe and a communal kitchen. The cafe would be an outdoor one, with sliding glass panels to close it in in winter, like the ones in Paris. This wouldn't be a full commune: everybody would have their own way of earning a living, everybody would retain their own income, and the dwellings would be priced according to size. Each would have a little kitchen, in case people wanted to eat alone, a good-sized living space, but not enormous, because the community center would be there. Maybe the community center would be beautiful, lush even. With playrooms for the kids and the adults, and sitting rooms with books. But everyone in the community, from the smallest walking child, would have a job in it.

The more my heart is parked in a place of thanksgiving and rejoicing, the less room I have for grumpiness. My kids are driving me crazy? At least they are healthy enough to have that kind of energy. Don't miss this chance to rejoice. My laundry is piled to the ceiling? Every stitch of clothing is evidence of life in my home. Don't miss this chance to rejoice. My husband isn’t all skippy romantic about the two of us shopping together? In the grand scheme of life, so what? He’s a good man. Don’t miss this chance to rejoice. I feel unorganized and behind and late on everything? Scale back, let unrealistic expectations go, and savor some happy moments today. Don’t miss this chance to rejoice. The more I rejoice, the more I keep things in perspective. The more I keep things in perspective, the gentler I become.

Everything with Chloe is more fun. Donuts and shopping and traveling on the candy plane—it’s all better when she’s around. Errand-running and laundry and hours spent at a flea market. I’ll take it. Because I know that every day I spend with Chloe is the best day of my life.

men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family’s books while simultaneously attending to their children’s health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale.

Women’s work is a natural resource that we don’t think we need to account for. Because we assume it will always be there. It’s considered invisible, indelible infrastructure.”10And because changing diapers, grocery shopping, doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, and cooking dinner are all coded as “a natural resource,” this labor doesn’t require maintenance, upkeep, replenishing, or even materials as far as traditional economics is concerned.

So many women I know feel the same, but we talk about it sotto voce. We avoid conflict, thinking instead that each of us has failed, individually, to fix her life properly, and under the righteous resentment there’s a shame that keeps our voices down. I pretend I am equal while I am: walking the dog/doing the grocery shopping/waiting in the orthodontist’s/commiserating about mean teens/folding laundry. I pretend I am equal when I am chopping vegetables/organising the counsellor or the hospital or the solicitor/de-griming the fridge. Actually, I mind none of it. This is my real life, with my real loves. I know that when I’m old I’ll envy my younger self her busyness, her purpose, her big-hearted whirligig life. But still, the distribution of labour is hard to make equal, because so much of it is hard to see, wrapped up in the definition of what it is to be me. Pretending I am not subject to modern versions of the same forces Eileen was, by ‘practising acceptance’ or ‘just getting on with it’, is a kind of lived insanity: to pretend to be liberated from the work while doing it.

OPTIONS FOR REDUCING While thrift stores such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army can be a convenient way to initially let go, many other outlets exist and are often more appropriate for usable items. Here are some examples: • Amazon.com • Antiques shops • Auction houses • Churches • Consignment shops (quality items) • Craigslist.org (large items, moving boxes, free items) • Crossroads Trading Co. (trendy clothes) • Diggerslist.com (home improvement) • Dress for Success (workplace attire) • Ebay.com (small items of value) • Flea markets • Food banks (food) • Freecycle.org (free items) • Friends • Garage and yard sales • Habitat for Humanity (building materials, furniture, and/or appliances) • Homeless and women’s shelters • Laundromats (magazines and laundry supplies) • Library (books, CDs and DVDs) • Local SPCA (towels and sheets) • Nurseries and preschools (blankets, toys) • Operation Christmas Child (new items in a shoe box) • Optometrists (eyeglasses) • Regifting • Rummage sales for a cause • Salvage yards (building materials) • Schools (art supplies, magazines, dishes to eliminate class party disposables) • Tool co-ops (tools) • Waiting rooms (magazines) • Your curb with a “Free” sign

There were, inevitably, children’s clothing stores, furniture shops still offering bedroom sets by layaway, and dollar stores whose awnings teemed with suspended inflatable dolls, beach chairs, laundry carts, and other impulse purchases a mom might make on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted by errand running with her kids. There was the sneaker store where Olga used to buy her cute kicks, the fruit store Prieto had worked at in high school, the little storefront that sold the kind of old-lady bras Abuelita used to wear. On the sidewalks, the Mexican women began to set up their snack stands. Mango with lime and chili on this corner, tamales on that. Until the Mexicans had come to Sunset Park, Olga had never tried any of this food, and now she always tried to leave a little room to grab a snack on her way home. Despite the relatively early hour, most of the shops were open, music blasting into the streets, granting the avenue the aura of a party. In a few more hours, cars with their stereos pumping, teens with boom boxes en route to the neighborhood’s public pool, and laughing children darting in front of their mothers would add to the cacophony that Olga had grown to think of as the sound of a Saturday.

Health professionals have a formal classification system for the level of function a person has. If you cannot, without assistance, use the toilet, eat, dress, bathe, groom, get out of bed, get out of a chair, and walk—the eight “Activities of Daily Living”—then you lack the capacity for basic physical independence. If you cannot shop for yourself, prepare your own food, maintain your housekeeping, do your laundry, manage your medications, make phone calls, travel on your own, and handle your finances—the eight “Independent Activities of Daily Living”—then you lack the capacity to live safely on your own.

SHE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.

I have never lost the thrill of travel. I still crave the mental and physical jolt of being somewhere new, of descending aeroplane steps into a different climate, different faces, different languages. It’s the only thing, besides writing, that can meet and relieve my ever-simmering, ever-present restlessness. If I have been too long at home, stuck in the routine of school-runs, packed lunches, swimming lessons, laundry, tidying, I begin to pace the house in the evenings. I might start to cook something complicated very late at night. I might rearrange my collections of Scandinavian glass. I will scan the bookshelves, sighing, searching for something I haven’t yet read. I will start sorting through my clothes, deciding on impulse to take armfuls to the charity shop. I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, wherever I can find it. My husband might return from an evening out to discover that I have moved all the furniture in the living room. I am not, at times like this, easy to live with. He will raise his eyebrows as I single-handedly shove the sofa towards the opposite wall, just to see how it might look. “Maybe,” he will say, as he unlaces his shoes, “we should book a holiday.

Thus, no matter where you live in New York City, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar (where you write your order on a pad outside as you walk by), a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen (beer and sandwiches delivered at any hour to your door), a flower shop, an undertaker's parlor, a movie house, a radio-repair shop, a stationer, a haberdasher, a tailor, a drug-store, a garage, a tearoom, a saloon, a hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop. Every block or two, in most residential sections of New York, is a little main street. A man starts for work in the morning and before he has gone two hundred yards he has completed half a dozen missions: bought a paper, left a pair of shoes to be soled, picked up a pack of cigarettes, ordered a bottle of whiskey to be dispatched in the opposite direction against his home-coming, written a message to the unseen forces of the wood cellar, and notified the dry cleaner that a pair of trousers awaits call. Homeward bound eight hours later, he buys a bunch of pussy willows, a Mazda bulb, a drink, a shine-- all between the corner where he steps off the bus and his apartment.

Letisha also misses New York, and what it offered her as a single mother, even at the same time that it made it impossible for her to stay. “In New York, everybody on the corner knew who I was,” she said. “Oh, that’s the brown woman with the baby and the dog.” This sense of community was comforting, and felt safe, even in the neighborhoods that she understood to be unsafe. One of her apartments, Letisha recalled, was “right next to a shady bodega,” but she said, “Never once did I feel unsafe in there.” She said she was never harassed on the street, often felt like the shop owners who sat outside on sidewalks served as an informal neighborhood watch, and felt comfortable enough with her neighbors, in each of her New York apartments, that she could ask for help getting groceries and a stroller up the stairs. She sometimes even left Lola in a store with neighbors while she ran across the street to pick up her laundry. “The attitude was: She’s one of us and we take care of our own,” she said. “I never felt like I was going to be in any danger. But you can’t control the shootings, and I wouldn’t go to block parties.” In her Virginia apartment complex, Letisha said, none of her neighbors acknowledge each other. For

If you’re at work in the laundry or the plate-shop, you’re assigned five minutes of each hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirty-five years, my time was twenty-five minutes after the hour, and after thirty-five years, that’s the only time I ever felt the need to take a piss or have a crap; twenty-five minutes past the hour. And if for some reason I couldn’t go, the need would pass at thirty after, and come back at twenty-five past the next hour. I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tiger—that institutional syndrome—and also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for nothing. How many nights must he have lain awake under his poster, thinking about that sewer line, knowing that the one chance was all he’d ever get? The blueprints might have told him how big the pipe’s bore was, but a blueprint couldn’t tell him what it would be like inside that pipe—if he would be able to breathe without choking, if the rats were big enough and mean enough to fight instead of retreating . . . and a blueprint couldn’t’ve told him what he’d find at the end of the pipe, when and if he got there. Here’s a joke even funnier than the parole would have been: Andy breaks into the sewer line, crawls through five hundred yards of choking, shit-smelling darkness, and comes up against a heavy-gauge mesh screen at the end of it. Ha, ha, very funny.

Motor-scooter riders with big beards and girl friends who bounce on the back of the scooters and wear their hair long in front of their faces as well as behind, drunks who follow the advice of the Hat Council and are always turned out in hats, but not hats the Council would approve. Mr. Lacey, the locksmith,, shups up his shop for a while and goes to exchange time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts compliments on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming. The baby carriages come out, and clusters of everyone from toddlers with dolls to teenagers with homework gather at the stoops. When I get home from work, the ballet is reaching its cresendo. This is the time roller skates and stilts and tricycles and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys, this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher's; this is the time when teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips shows or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG's; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know on Hudson street will go by. As the darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes under lights, eddying back nad forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop. I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best from waking long after midnight to tend a baby and, sitting in the dark, seeing the shadows and hearing sounds of the sidewalk. Mostly it is a sound like infinitely patterning snatches of party conversation, and, about three in the morning, singing, very good singing. Sometimes their is a sharpness and anger or sad, sad weeping, or a flurry of search for a string of beads broken. One night a young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not too close, until police came. Out came the heads, too, along the Hudsons street, offering opinion, "Drunk...Crazy...A wild kid from the suburbs" Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless someone calls the together. Like the bagpipe. Who the piper is and why he favored our street I have no idea.

Which brings us to a little book that may provide a clue to the cure. My wife got it as a gift from a friend. It is titled Porn for Women. It’s a picture book of hunks, photographed in all their chiseled, muscle-bound, testosterone-marinated, PG-rated glory. Lots of naked chests and low-cut jeans, complete with tousled hair and beckoning eyes. And they are ALL doing housework. There’s a picture of a well-cut Adonis, and he’s loading the washing machine. The caption reads: “As soon as I finish the laundry, I’ll do the grocery shopping. And I’ll take the kids with me so you can relax.” There’s another hunk, the cover guy, vacuuming the floor. A particularly athletic-looking man peers up from the sports section and declares, “Ooh, look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we’ll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair”. Porn for Women. Available at a marriage near you.

If I won the lottery I’d still shop at Wal-Mart, because I’m Uncle Scrooge, and three dollars is three dollars. God bless America.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m trying to rescue a drowning man, and I only have time to rise to the surface for one gasp of air before I go back down again. There is an exhilaration to it, a high born only partly of exhaustion, and I find myself almost frighteningly alive. There is nothing like calamity for refreshing the moment. Ironically, the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles. Now there is an intensity to the humblest things—buying paper towels, laundry detergent, dog food, keeping the household running in Rich’s absence. One morning I buy myself a necklace made of sea glass, and it becomes a talisman. Shopping contains the future. As my daughter Jennifer says, shopping is hope.

Driving into Huddersfield, Mary followed the signs for the city center and Kingsgate Shopping Centre. She managed to shoehorn the Volvo into the multistory car park without scraping too much paint off on the concrete pillars, then led the fractious and irritated children out in search of a toilet facility, fast food, and some sort of bribe. “There’s a GameStop in here,” she told Robert, “and something called The Entertainer Toy Shop. Wouldn’t you like to go there after lunch, children?

If I were in Manila, I doubt I would ever have to make a trip to the grocery alone. There would be family—sisters, brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, in the absence of whom, amigas, yayas, even drivers could be counted on… If I were in Manila, instead of here, I would never have enough time to sit alone on a bench on the sidewalk or walk down the street or ride trains by myself. I would be chauffeured. I would be chaperoned. I would spend Sunday afternoons playing mah-jong or having tea or shopping or exchanging gossip with my friends, rather than sweeping floors or doing the laundry or tending to the garden or overseeing the work of some enterprising teen shoveling the snow off the front yard.

Women over a certain age become socially invisible: people just ignore us. I’m close enough to the tipping point that if I don’t take care of my appearance, I can fall foul of it. It’s a very strange experience, being the invisible middle-aged woman. You can walk into a shop or restaurant or a bar and eyeballs just seem to slide past you as if you aren’t there. When you’re trying to get served, it’s infuriating, sometimes to the point of being humiliating as well, but in our line of work . . .

Even though it’s easy to fall back into a routine and keep himself busy, he still misses him. It hits him at the most inopportune moments, like when he’s grocery shopping for the Woods and gets stupidly emotional just putting bananas in the cart, or the day he does laundry and finds the cross country t-shirt Harry was wearing the first day they met, mixed in with all of Louis’ clothes. He casts a cursory glance around the laundry room and then takes a whiff of the collar, hoping for a whiff of something he can no longer smell.

I’m going to tell you a really important lesson I learned after Emily died. I thought I knew what it was to be part of a team. I was in the army, joined Delta, I trusted my team with everything, and knew they had my back no matter what. Then I lost my wife and was the sole parent to a newborn. Lolly was my responsibility, and I took that seriously. I tried to juggle everything myself. Funeral arrangements, caring for Lolly, taking care of the house, laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, midnight feeds, and a colicky baby. I thought I had to do it all and didn’t want to accept help from anyone. You know what eventually happened?” “What?” “I crashed. Two months after Lolly was born, I was cooking dinner, lay down for just a moment, and woke up an hour later to someone hammering on my apartment door. Dinner burned which set off the smoke detectors, the fire department came, and I realized that raising my daughter wasn’t a mission I could undertake without my team. I needed my parents, needed Bear and the rest of Alpha team, needed Prey and the Oswalds. So, I reached out for help.

As we wander, I’m struck by something so simple. In the heated couple on the corner, in the women carrying their shopping home, in the children playing and screaming in the streets. Naples is a place of connection. Of community. There is beauty to the run-down buildings, the laundry strung high overhead, the rhythm and drawl of daily life here. There is beauty, too, in the old Mediterranean architecture, buildings left over from centuries ago, before Naples became what it is today. There is beauty in the discrepancy—two things that seem oppositional, coming together. New and old, rich and ruined, history in its entirety, here at once. It’s a place that was once glorious and carries the memory not as a chip, but a promise. Again, someday.

We would perhaps have observed a little clapboarded white house, badly needing paint, standing back a little from the street between a blacksmith’s shop and a Chinese laundry. In place of the moat we would have noticed only an uneven brick sidewalk, and the courtyard we would have found crowded full of new gravestones of granite and marble. If we were very observing we might have caught a glimpse of the white face of a serious little girl of ten or thereabouts in a second-story window of the house.

When you want to be a woman, follow my advice. Speak in a thin, pretty voice. It has to be high-pitched. Try pushing it up into your nose. Cover your mouth when you laugh. Press down firmly and neatly when writing. Grow your hair to your shoulders. Curls are discouraged. Flap your wrists often. Show enthusiasm about grocery shopping and cooking. Beef up your cooking skills. Be unfailingly kind to others—especially men. Use your charm to get out of danger. Fall in love with a man. Eat very little. Even if you really want to finish it, leave some on your plate. Make sure you attain a slim figure and maintain it for your whole life. Play dumb, with no regard for your actual intelligence. Disparage your driving. Be chatty. Try your best to sincerely enjoy cleaning and doing laundry. Think of weakness as a virtue, and let your strength rot away. Wear makeup even in your dreams. Wear bright clothing. Conceal your sexual appetite, and take it to your grave. Become shyness incarnate. . . . There’s a fuckton more where that all comes from. I just couldn’t write it all down. To act the part of a woman, you’ve got to memorize a hefty script.

With her silence alone she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let them linger.

Next thing she knew, Portia hurried into the Fairway Market on Broadway. The grocery store was unlike anything she had seen in Texas. Bins of fruit and vegetables lined the sidewalk, forming narrow entrances into the market. Inside, the aisles were crowded, no inch of space wasted. In the fresh vegetables and fruit section she was surrounded by piles of romaine and red-leaf lettuce, velvety thick green kale that gave away to fuzzy kiwi and mounds of apples. Standing with her eyes closed, Portia waited a second, trying not to panic. Then, realizing there was no help for it, she gave in to the knowing, not to the fluke meal inspired by Gabriel Kane, but to the chocolate cake and roast that had hit her earlier. She started picking out vegetables. Cauliflower that she would top with Gruyere and cheddar cheeses; spinach she would flash fry with garlic and olive oil. In the meat department, she asked for a standing rib roast to serve eight. Then she stopped. "No," she said to the butcher, her eyes half-closed in concentration, "just give me enough for four." Portia made it through the store in record time. Herbs, spices. Eggs, flour. Baking soda. A laundry of staples. At the last second, she realized she needed to make a chowder. Crab and corn with a dash of cayenne pepper. Hot, spicy.

For a person to be self-reliant in any community, a level of competence is required that enables the accomplishment of tasks beyond those of basic self-care (which are referred to as physical self-maintenance). For this reason, M. Powell Lawton identified the use of the telephone, food preparation, housekeeping, laundry, shopping, money management, driving or use of transportation, and medication management as important daily activities and proposed the term instrumental activities of daily living (ADL) to describe them35 (see Chapters 14, 21, 22, 23, and 28).

In the northernmost block, located next to a public square and close to the main thoroughfare, various non-residential uses have flourished alongside a range of dwelling types, including a student residence. The active ground floors include small shops, offices, and services, a “bodega” pub, a cellar restaurant and music venue, and a nursery school with big front windows. There is a co-op supermarket that has progressively expanded into neighboring buildings, including a former cinema and a bank, creating an important local shopping hub. The courtyard includes a nursery for the smallest children and a shared laundry for the student housing.

The sharing economy is also growing, in which the culture of ownership —with every household equipped with its own washing machine and car—is giving way to a culture of access, with households sharing laundry facilities and renting cars by the hour from a local car club. Rather than go shopping for new clothes, books and children’s toys, a growing number of people are swapping—or ‘swishing’—them with friends and neighbours.41 In such an economy, plenty of economic value will still be generated through the products and services that people enjoy, but far less of that total value will flow through market transactions. The implication of these various trends for GDP growth? ‘The steady decline of GDP in the coming years,’ concludes Rifkin, ‘is going to be increasingly attributable to the change-over to a vibrant new economic paradigm that measures economic value in totally new ways.

Things like laying out your clothes and pre-deciding what you want to wear (and doing laundry if you’re lacking clean clothes), ensuring you’ve bought the things you need for the morning and breakfast so you don’t need to hit a restaurant or shop with those precious morning hours, perhaps pre-completing some mindless tasks that would otherwise need to be done in the morning.

When evaluating a new client for degree of independence, I consider four factors: 1. Emotional issues: Does the person have good resources within himself or herself for coping independently with emotional issues that come up, or does he or she turn to parents not only for advice, but for cues as to how to react to the event in question? 2. Financial issues: Does the adult child earn an adequate living on his or her own, or does he or she rely heavily on parental input for things such as job contacts, supplemental funds, or housing? 3. Practical issues/interactive situations: Can the person manage day-to-day living, finances, nutrition, exercise, and housekeeping? 4. Career/Education issues: Does the person have a rewarding job or career that is commensurate with his or her abilities and offers the potential for further success? Is the person willing to learn new things to increase his or her productivity or compensation? These are the basic skills of living, many of which are addressed in the social ability questionnaire. Just as there are levels of social functioning, so too there are levels of independent functioning. All three of the following levels describe an adult with some degree of dependency problems. A healthy adult is someone who is independent financially, is able to manage practical and interactive issues, and who stays in touch with family but does not rely almost solely on family for emotional support. Level 1—Low Functioning Emotional issues: Lives at home with parent(s) or away from home in a fully structured or supervised environment. Financial issues: Contributes virtually nothing financially to the running of the household. Practical issues: Chooses clothes to wear that day, but does not manage own wardrobe (i.e., laundry, shopping, etc.). Relies on family members to buy food and prepare meals. Does few household chores, if any. May try a few tasks when asked, but seldom follows through until the job is finished. Career/education issues: Is not table to keep a job, and therefore does not earn an independent living. Extremely resistant to learning new skills or changing responsibilities. Level 2: Moderately functioning Emotional issues: Lives either at home or nearby and calls home every day. Relies on parents to discuss all details of daily life, from what happened at work or school that day to what to wear the next day. Will call home for advice rather than trying to figure something out for him- or herself. Financial issues: May rely on parents for supplemental income—parents may supply car, apartment, etc. May be employed by parents at an inflated salary for a job with very few responsibilities. May be irresponsible about paying bills. Practical issues: Is able to make daily decisions about clothing, but may rely on parents when shopping for clothing and other items. Neglects household responsibilities such as laundry, cleaning and meal planning. Career/education issues: Has a job, but is unable to cope with much on-the-job stress; job is therefore only minimally challenging, or a major source of anxiety—discussed in detail with Mom and Dad. Level 3: Functioning Emotional issues: Lives away from home. Calls home a few times a week, relies on family for emotional support and most socializing. Few friends. Practical issues: Handles all aspects of daily household management independently. Financial issues: Is financially independent, pays bills on time. Career/education issues: Has achieved some moderate success at work. Is willing to seek new information, even to take an occasional class to improve skills.

Austin RV Park North is located conveniently in North Austin and is easily accessible to Round Rock, Pflugerville, Cedar Park, and Leander. RV campgrounds in Austin TX have a Laundry at the back of the Park for the use of our guests and a Walmart nearby. There are great restaurants and shopping nearby in La Frontera shopping center.

WHAT I DO ON MAINTENANCE DAY If you’re curious, here’s a complete list of everything I wait to tackle until Sunday morning—all of which takes me, at a leisurely pace, four to six hours: • Grocery shopping • Clean house and office • Create a meal and workout plan • Trim beard and shave • Do laundry • Prepare lunches in Tupperware containers for the week • Water plants • Read articles I’ve saved up throughout the week • Review my projects, and define next steps (this page) • Review my “Waiting For” list • Define three outcomes for the week ahead (this page) • Clear out all my inboxes (this page) • Review my hot spots (this page) • Review my Accomplishments List Naturally, your own Maintenance Day ritual will vary.

Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are twenty-two fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment (VCCA), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT), and Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of a prisoner’s wages to pay for penalties. It can take decades to pay fines. Some 10 million Americans owe $50 billion in fees and fines because of their arrest or imprisonment, according to a 2015 report by the Brennan Center. If a prisoner who is fined $10,000 at sentencing relies solely on a prison salary, he or she will owe about $4,000 after making monthly payments for twenty-five years. Prisoners often leave prison in debt to the state. And if they cannot continue to make regular payments—difficult because of high unemployment among ex-felons—they are sent back to prison. High recidivism is part of the design. Most of the prison functions once handled by governments have become privatized. Corporations run prison commissaries and, since the prisoners have nowhere else to shop, often jack up prices by as much as 100 percent. Corporations have taken over the phone systems and grossly overcharge prisoners and their families. They demand exorbitant fees for money transfers from families to prisoners. And corporations, with workshops inside prisons, pay little more than a dollar a day to prison laborers. Food and merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry services, uniform companies, prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor, and the array of medieval-looking instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a host of other contractors feed like jackals off prisons. Prisons, in America, are big business.

I loved him. I felt loved by him. We’d made it almost two years as a long-distance couple, and now, finally, we could be a short-distance couple. It meant that we once again had weekend hours to linger in bed, to read the newspaper and go out for brunch and share every thought we had. We could have Monday night dinners and Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night dinners, too. We could shop for groceries and fold laundry in front of the TV. On the many evenings when I still got weepy over the loss of my dad, Barack was now there to curl himself around me and kiss the top of my head.

I would sit in class and imagine myself being spanked. Daydream while at the laundry mat, a stranger tying me up and taking me in all my intimate spots. God, I practically had an orgasm while grocery shopping mentally visualizing being down on my knees and gagging on a large cock.

A Letter to Grandparents Dear Grandparents (and other family members), Congratulations on the birth of your new grandchild! This birth marks the continuation of your family into a new generation. Your support and love can ease your own child’s transition into parenthood. If your children invite you to come and help, recognize it as an honor. Ask what you may do to help: Prepare meals? Do laundry? Shop? Keep the house clean? You will work hard, sleep little, and leave tired and appreciated. But please avoid the mistakes that some new grandparents make—monopolizing the baby, criticizing the parent’s decisions and actions, and giving unwanted, out-of-date, or opinionated advice. Of course, if they ask you for advice, feel free to give it or to check recent books in areas where you are uncertain. What your grandchild needs most from you is a nurturing support of their parents. The parents need you to support and honor their thoughtful decisions about and style of parenting, even if different from yours. Discover what books they are reading on newborn care and feeding and read the same books yourself. You are needed to support them as they learn about and care for their new baby. The new parents need to hear that you think they are wonderful parents and the very best parents your grandchild could have. They need to hear from you that parenthood is always challenging and tiring and, at the same time, one of the most important and rewarding things they will ever do. Let them know you have confidence in them. If your relationship with the parents is strained or difficult, think of what you can and cannot do to support this new family. If being with them is too difficult for you, or for them, your presence might worsen your relationship and make this adjustment to parenthood more difficult. Instead of visiting right away, you might send help in the form of costs of a postpartum doula, diaper service, meals, or the presence of another family member. Reaching out in this way could go a long way in healing your relationship. Be gentle with your expectations of the new family and forgiving if they forget to thank you for your presence and gifts. Memories are made in these first weeks following birth—ones never forgotten. Your children will always remember your unconditional love and acceptance. With best wishes for joyful grandparenting, Penny Simkin