Laundry how-to

Dear Pablo,

Sydney and Gilbert have been arguing lately about which of them is to help their mom with the laundry. Since I am an expert at helping with laundry, I thought I would give a simple primer for all of our friends.

In case anyone has not noticed, the human species does not have much fur to keep them warm. (If you look closely, they have very thin hairs, but certainly not enough to guard them from the chill.) Because of this unfortunate disability, they drape themselves with clothing to fend off hypothermia. The poor things are slaves to their clothing, always needing to wash it, fold it and get it out again. It's a vicious cycle. It's the least I can do to help them out a bit. Here are some tasks that you can do to help your people with the laundry as well:
1. sitting in the empty laundry basket helps to remind them that it is time to wash a load of clothes.
2. sitting on top of the clean clothes (unfolded) in the basket helps to compress them in preparation for folding. (flatness is important to make the clothes fit into the drawers). Above you can see me performing this task recently.
3. similarly, sitting on top of the folded clean clothes offers further compression. There is also the added benefit of contributing some of your fur to the clothes so that they will be warmer.
4. inspection and supervision. The "sniff test" ensures that the clean clothes are truly fresh-smelling.

Of course, cats are more suited to these tasks. Dogs are generally too big to fit into the basket. But it's nice of them to try to help.