Gingerbread, Laundry and Hems, Oh, My...

What's left...

I CANNOT believe what I just did.  I had a post written about my lack of focus the past few weeks...okay month...and I just did something, and the whole thing deleted...speaking of dumb things I've done this month.  Maybe I should be writing this in Word or Pages and saving it.
Let's try again.
First I need to explain that I've been working on getting stabilized on some BP meds, and they have made me tired, nauseous, dizzy and unfocused.  And to top it all off, I was sick last week.  I'm just saying, I don't think this is the real me lately.
A few weeks ago I tried making gingerbread, and left out the baking soda, even after reading the recipe many times and getting all the ingredients out ahead of time.  I just put the baking soda back without using it.  The gingerbread came out of the pan in a nice flat, hard, uncuttable piece; a gingerbread cutting board of sorts.  We did not eat it.  I broke it up so it would fit in the trash better.
I tried baking something else and made a major error, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was now.  Sigh.  I guess I'm not all the way better yet.
The most recent thing that I did was to change the bedding last week after being sick with stomach flu.  My husband was out of town, so when he returned I wanted to make sure that he would not get sick, and he'd have a fresh, non-germy bed to sleep in.  So I stripped the bed, scooped up the sheets and tossed them into the washer.
At the end of the cycle, I started to throw them into the dryer.  As I did, I noticed that one of the hand towels that I washed with the sheets seemed to have tissue on it.  Great.  I'd washed some tissues that must have been in bed with me.  I hate washing a tissue.  White pieces of paper all over everything!  I looked more closely at the light sheets and noticed that they had the tissue on them also.  I looked in the washer to see if there was tissue on the walls of the washer.  Yup.
But what was that in the bottom of the tub?  A spring?  I panicked.  It was about a foot long and an inch in diameter...a very big spring.   I'd broken the washer!  How could my washer have thrown a spring?
As I looked at it, it looked vaguely familiar.  I'd seen it before.  And then I realized what it was.  It was the ring binder of a book I'd read in bed.  232 pages: 116 sheets plus front and back cover.  118 pieces of paper.  Washed with my good sheets.  The Egyptian cotton 500 count sheets.  My splurge set.
I set the load out on the floor and unenthusiastically vacuumed the inside of my washing machine.  Then I put it through its 3 hour clean cycle.  No more washes tonight.
I picked up the hand towel again to see what could be done.  I took it outside and began to shake it energetically, sending white paper snowflakes into the air, and all over my dark shirt.  When I was out of breath I stopped and examined it again.  The paper fibers were still in the towel fibers, permanently embedded.  Discouraged, I left the mountain of wet laundry on the floor hoping my feeble brain would come up with an answer to the problem.
I remade the bed with my not favorite bedding.
The next day, resigned to the fact that they were going to be way too much trouble to try to de-paper, I picked up the mountain to stuff it into a trash bag.  It was now dried into a nice paper-mache sculpture.   I was pretty sure my decision to discard the evidence was the right one.
Is it any wonder that it took me 3 hours last Friday to work up the courage to hem my husband's two new pairs of pants?  Four legs.  The opportunities were limitless.