The worst thing EVER.

Man oh man. This week has been interesting, hasn't it? Haha! Tsu loses his job, goats start popping out babies left and right, I get to cram my arm into one of them up to my elbow to rescue a stuck baby, we have super high highs and super low lows and right in the midst of it all the worst thing imaginable happens...


My washing machine screws up.


What? That doesn't seem THAT bad you say? OK, let us put this into perspective. Imagine you have just delivered and dried off a baby goat. You have a stack of 4 towels and a pile of rags covered in amniotic fluid, bits of placenta and other weird thick slime-like substances, sticky pools of colostrum, baby's first bowel movement and blood. You rinse them off first to get the chunks off then toss them in the washer which fills with water, sloshes, then promptly refuses to drain.

Soooo now I have a stack of towels and rags covered in all that foul stuff sitting in several inches of water in my front load machine.

*falls to her knees, lifts her arms to the sky, throws back her head and cries "NOOOOOOOOO!!!!"*

First, let me explain... I hate doing laundry almost but not quite as much as I hate doing dishes. But when we moved back here we got two discount priced floor model laundry machines. A stunning front load washer and dryer with glass fronts so i could watch my clothing go round and round. They don't match, but that doesn't stop me from loving them more than I have loved any appliance aside from my dishwasher. I have composed poetry for my dishwasher, we have a special relationship, but my laundry machines are a close second.

Soooo... With fear and trepidation I notified Tsu of the situation. The last time I had a laundry machine emergency it was my dryer and this brilliant man rode in on a white horse in his shining armour, took a look at it, went online, ordered some cheap electronic parts that he had to later solder in and VIOLA! my dryer worked again. But, you know, it's been an odd week, my friends. A week of extremes both good and bad. I REALLLLY wasn't in a frame of mind to risk it going bad.

Well, after some exploratory surgery on the machine Tsu found an internal filter just before the water pump that was, um... well it was clearly not pushing anything through. Only the washer was full of water. the chosen remedy to this was to soak out as much water with the already saturated towels. I stood in the tub with my foot on one end of the towel and twisted it to squeeze the water out while Tsu soaked the next towel. I took off my pants to do this so my hems wouldn't get wet, hehe. Yeah. Me in the tub with no pants on, using my feet to help wring out the towel. A good time was had by all. Not really.

Once this step was done I made my exit. Some time later Tsu steps into the hall and exclaims. I forget what he exclaimed but there was laughing and possibly swear words involved. I believe it ended with "You need to come see this."

Now, we had suspected that the issue was from me washing my barn coat and not getting the chaff from hay out of all my pockets well enough. I was fully expecting to find this to be the case and to be scolded for plugging the machine and making work for him... but there was actually very little hay in there at all. What was there was 5 years of lint and cat hair packed into the filter along with a few pennies, some bits of metal, possibly some nails and heaven only knows what else. This filter was about an inch and a half wide and four inches long and packed solid. Tsu had to soak it in the sink and use a screw driver to pry everything out of it. Then he had to verrry carefully drain the water out to avoid plugging the drain.

I'm tempted to go take a picture of the terrifying mess it left behind. But I don't want to make anyone vomit.


On second thought, hold on. You have GOT to see this.


Be warned, this is not for the faint of heart of sensitive of stomach. You. Have. been. WARNED.



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AAAHHHHHHHHH!

*runs around in small circles screaming and waving her hands over her head*

I read my owner's manual from cover to cover. There was NOTHING in there about this filter and it needing to be cleaned. But clearly in a household full of hairballs this sucker needs to be cleaned now and then!

On the bright side my washer works again, just like new, and we have clean towels free of goat birth slime and other funk... and it didn't cost us a penny. On the not so bright side... Tsu's sink is full of sludge.