11:47 p.m. Some days your pictures are blurry. Some days, this is all you have to show.

Today is one of those days. I was going to be clever and prove that I had actually managed to fold some laundry in between all my more pressing fabulous tasks. I grabbed the camera and I was too casual.

Instead of focusing, I rush. Instead of competence, I expose the fact that I have a T-shirt with pink flamingos on it. And that it's ragged and slumping with age and numerous ablutions, as are we all.

So now the neat-ish piles are put away and yes, the bed was never made today -- or any day, for that matter, unless people are coming through and I'm pretending. I believe this Perfect Houswife rule can be ignored if you've actually stacked some laundry. I am also grateful that, though I may be behind in my laundry, I'm not actually behind my laundry.

I'm trying to keep my priorities straight.

When I stand in the bedroom and fold a pillowcase, I begrudge. I don't have the time. Who's stealing all the time? I hear the neighbor next door rail and gesticulate into a rubber-antennaed air phone in her raw ragged French voice. She wears beige tap-dancer shoes every single day. They have straps across the instep and stacked heels. Every inch of her outside space is covered with wooden patio slats and so she doesn't walk, she punctuates.

She makes me want to grab my laundry basket and hide.

But first, I have to get a laundry basket. We used to have one of those nice big wickery ones, the oval-shaped kind with a handle at either end. The kind Sofia Loren could hold against her hip with one long arm while shielding her eyes with the back of her other long arm. Wisps of dark hair, of course, escaping. Breeze blowing her skirt against her strong legs.

Earth mother. Almost like my mother. They are both Italian.

We used to have a wringer washer in the basement of our house. It was my job to feed in the wet clothes to be squashed against the black rubber rollers. There are so many tricks to this task ... so many ways the clothes came alive when pressed to give up all that sudsy water.

Most pieces of clothing would relaxe and go in without a fuss -- shirts shrugging their shoulders and waving their arms, socks and undies enfolding each other -- but if you put a pillowcase on the spinning roller open-end first, you'd have a big balloon of water ready to explode, depending on the thread count and general fabric porosity.

I lived for such excitement. Plus, you had to keep the line going at all times, hooking one thing onto the thing before it or a stray sock would start flapping around one roller, getting caught, getting caught, and then the rubber would start to squeal and I would hear my mother's slippers slapping against her bare heels.

You also had to keep your fingers out of the rollers, obviously, or they'd get squashed. Well, as you can imagine ... one time a sock got caught and I tried to grab it and I wasn't fast enough and the rollers grabbed me and whsooosp sucked my fingers and hand and arm right through up to the elbow. A mighty squealing.

My mother came and looked at the scene. She picked up the empty laundry basket and bashed me with it a couple of times before she turned off the machine and let me loose. "That was for scaring me," she said.

I keep forgetting to buy a laundry basket. I really don't need one -- my washer and dryer are on the second floor of my house, down the hall from the bedrooms.

Plus, I keep forgetting to get my mother's birthday card mailed on time. I had to send it overnight today to get it there tomorrow. She's going to hit the ceiling when she sees two unused stamps on the envelope in addition to the $12 or so it took to overnight it.

And it's odd -- I'm far enough and old enough and tall enough and I have an automatic washer. But I'm still caught.