Socks

For me, this is the epitome of the wisdom found in that old saying, "don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today."

I usually try to match my socks after each load of laundry so there are fewer to deal with. But sometimes I'm in a rush - I need to get them out of the way and I don't have time to put them together. That's a bad idea.

Today, I used my last matched pair of black socks. And was faced - taunted, even - by about 3000 individual black socks sitting in my drawer. Of those 1500 possible pairs, I have about 1480 different styles. These styles share about 99.98% of their sock DNA in common. Generally thin, with very few distinguishing features... there's one pair with pinstripes, a couple with a distinctive band around the top, but most are just.... black.

And to make it worse, there are some blue ones in there - very dark blue that have an identical style to some of the black ones, and completely indistinguishable under incandescent lighting, but, once in natural light, show their true colors.

And so I am faced with a choice. I could spend most of Sunday surrounded by a pile of socks, or I can hope for sunshine and the start of sandal season. Looking at the forecast, I don't like the direction this seems to be going. Or how about this - if anybody is free on Sunday, maybe we can have something like an old-fashioned barn-raising party. You know, lemonade, pound cake, and good friends in a circle, sharing stories, laughing and matching up socks. We could even do like a "go fish" kind of game or something. They're all clean, after all.

Any takers?