St. Agnes of Prague, St. Clare -- pray for me!

My washing machine is broken. It thinks it's spinning out water, but it's not. The guy at the appliance center said it's like a transmission problem in your car, when the shifter says you've gone from PARK to REVERSE, but the car just stays parked. Well, it was a refurbished washer when we bought it six years ago, so I guess it's had a good run, since most washing machines are only built to give 10 years of service these days.

I managed to get two last loads through it on Sunday by turning the machine off, waiting several minutes, and then turning it on again. This took about double the time it would have taken to wash all the clothes in an old wringer-washer, but with my hands being so weak, it was easier for me to do.

My husband says I shouldn't take a chance and try to wash any more loads with this machine. But the laundry is piling up. You moms know what I mean -- if I don't do laundry every single day, I soon have a mountain of dirty clothes and linens staring at me. I just realized that Zooey only has one more school shirt but two more days of school this week. Lola's out of shorts. Edyn's out of short-sleeved shirts (not that she minds -- she's wearing her play dresses, which she likes better anyway), and she's about to run out of underwear, which any mom knows is an absolute tragedy for a newly toilet-trained toddler. And I'm out of cloth napkins, dish towels and bibs for the baby younger toddler.

The laundromat is not an option -- we're out of money until payday next Friday. Even the change bank is depleted to pennies, so I don't have the $1 per load. And we won't be able to buy a newer refurbished washer until my husband gets a freelance check that's due sometime in early May. Credit card is NOT an option -- our credit card was just sold to one of those national banks, which jacked up our interest rate TEN FULL POINTS simply because they now own our account. (We called and got the rate lowered, but we just went through this with another company before we switched banks, and every other month, they'd pull the same stunt.) There ought to be a law against this kind of usury, you know? Regardless though, we can't put anything on it unless it's a dire, dire, DIRE emergency.

Soooo...my husband is working late tonight, and I'm just going to defy him and put at least one load in the washer, trying my little trick of shutting it off and waiting 5-10 minutes if it forgets to spin out. This time, though, I'm going into this begging my patronness, St. Agnes of Prague, and her mentor, St. Clare to pray for me, since they both look out for laundry-workers.

If you feel like praying for my laundry situation, too, I'd sure appreciate it.

--Sparki