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NOTE: This is part two of a (hopefully) two part series. Don’t forget to scroll down to the next entry to read the rest.

Well, I suppose the second dumbest thing I’ve done in the last week is that I forgot to post the dumbest thing I’ve done in the last entry. So, without further adieu (we’ve too much adieu as it is), here’s the dumbest thing that I’ve done this week (and possibly so far in 2005):

Last night I decided I should do a couple loads of laundry. I’d been purposefully putting it off so that most of my stuff would be clean when I moved (meaning most of my stuff was dirty), because the idea of packing dirty laundry seems odd.

Normally, when I do laundry, I check all of my pants pockets. This time, I did not. I even ~noticed~, at the time, that I did not. I thought to myself, “hmm… I’m not checking the pockets. Ah well, there’s never anything in them anyway.” Except this time, there was. There were in fact two things in my pockets.

When I pulled my clothes out of the washer to put them in the dryer, I found the first thing. It was my USB flash drive, my sole repository of far too many of my more important files. And I’d run it through the washing machine. I’d even used hot water for good measure. Amazingly, I took it upstairs, and it still works. It still goes down as one of my dumber moments.

When I pulled my clothes out of the dryer to take them upstairs to fold, I found thing number two: a black gel pen. Well, it ~was~ a black gel pen. By the time it’d made it through the washer and dryer, it was empty. Guess where all the ink was? On my clothes! That’s right. I washed, and dried, my clothes with a big black gel pen. I threw that set of clothes back in the washer in hopes the ink would come out, and put the second set in the dryer. Turns out there was a decent amount of ink left in the dryer, because a few of those came out splotched as well. And the ink didn’t come out upon rewashing.

In short, I managed to visually mar most of my favorite clothing in one go. None of the clothing was particularly ~expensive~, per se, but in terms of quantity I still probably managed to ruin a good $300 worth of clothing. Undergarments I could care less about, but now four or five pairs of jeans and probably at least a dozen of my shirts have big nasty black splotches on them. They don’t look artsy. They look, in fact, like some idiot left a big black pen in with the laundry.

When I get home from work tonight I plan to go through my stuff and determine what is salvageable and what is not. Sounds like one of the more depressing ways to spend a Thursday night. Especially considering how fun last Thursday was.