Dirty laundry reached critical mass today. Unlike my friend Croft, I like to wear clothes, so I decided to deal with the huge mountain this afternoon.

While at Walmart, I stopped at the bank in the store to try to buy a roll of quarters. In Canada, I usually get turned away if I’m not a customer of the bank, but I had no trouble here and the lady who served me was very nice.

Armed with $10 worth of quarters, I hauled my three very full garbage bags of clothes to the tiny laundromat a couple of minutes from the beach next to the saloon and gas bar.

I apologize for the quality of these pictures, I need more practice with the iPad camera. 🙂

This laundromat is a wonderful service to the community. The seven machines (four washers, three dryers) are fairly recent and the building is very clean, missing only a chair to make it a pleasant laundry cleaning environment.

It is pricy, $1.75 to wash and $1.50 to dry. But that’s better than schlepping to a laundromat in Port Lavaca and the $1.50 to dry got everything but my two heaviest skirts dry, even my towels. I hung out in the truck and the hour or so it took to get everything done passed very quickly. My $10 was just enough!

Putting away laundry now is so much more pleasant since I mastered the wardrobe and got my wonderful, still cooing over it, dresser. So I actually got the laundry put away right upon arrival instead of tripping over the basket for a few days. The bulk of it does get hung in the wardrobe and I learned early on in my  adventures to put the clothes on the hangers at the laundromat so that they magically walk their way to the wardrobe and get hung up before they wrinkle. 🙂

Now, in the words of Robin Williams, I’m huuuuuuuuuuungry, so I’m off to cook up that ham steak I got today. First time of my adult life that I make ham at home!

My latest Walmart list was very eclectic, so I knew it would take a lot of time to fill. I decided to wait until I had both the time in an afternoon to go and wander and the need to get out of the rig. This afternoon was the day; the pantry was very bare!

I spent over an hour wandering the aisles trying to figure out where things might be. Hardware? Toys? Electronics? Cleaning Supplies? I found all but two things, a little cabinet for the office and matches, which were not in the camping supplies. So I’m stumped and wonder if Walmart carries any. I don’t mean the flimsy cardboard kind smokers use, but sturdy wooden ones for lighting fires.

One thing I did find surprised me, a three-drawer cabinet that was almost exactly the right size to put in an overhead cabinet in the study to hold paper supplies:

I wish it was just a little wider to hold the legal sized file folders, but this was a nice find, and was just $12.

I decided to head to ACE Hardware to see if they might have a hardware cabinet for my office. Office desktop drawers are not the right dimensions for what I had in mind and crazy pricy, hence my thought to look at a hardware store. I’ve been storing my supplies like pens, Post-It notes, and highlighters in my desk drawers, which is a really poor use of space. I never know what I have, so I tend to overbuy.

I had a vision of a desktop shallow, long, and low cabinet with tons and tons of drawers exactly the right size for all my supplies.

Kind of like this:

The drawers are about an inch too short for writing implements, but I can store those things diagonally. Everything else fits perfectly. There wasn’t a single thing I wanted to store in it that doesn’t fit and I even have room for things that I didn’t think would fit (like my stapler). I screwed it to the wall. On a less windy day (ha ha ha ha) I am going to remove all the drawers, take the casing outside, and give it a couple of coats of dark brown paint.

(Thank you Mr. ACE Hardware guy who got the dang thing off a very high shelf and provided a variety of office supplies to test the dimensions while making me feel like a valued customer.)

Now, I have room in my desk drawers for my headset, label maker, scanner, and a bunch of other stuff. This little cabinet was $20 very well spent and is a good use of desktop real estate space!

While at ACE, I remembered to have the truck key copied so that I have a spare… but I forgot the matches. Dang!