Their Convenience Before Mine

There will generally be one day out of the week when I will do my laundry. Normally, that day would be Thursday. However, my stepdad has that day off, and there's no telling if he will want to do some then or not. He's also off on Tuesday (another day that I have off from my volunteer work), and that may be the day that he will want to do laundry. However, his schedule has him at work from 12 to 9. So, I'll just do my laundry tomorrow when I get home.

Out of principle, my laundry is one of those things I try to reserve for when I have the house to myself. For all I know, other people in the house may want to do laundry as well, may want a shower at some point, or may want to do something else with which my doing laundry might conflict. I've had that happen one time. It was on a Saturday. Because of the problems we were having with our washer at the time, I could only do the laundry in small loads. I rarely, if ever had the house to myself long enough to do laundry at the time. The Saturday that I had done it turned out to create an inconvenience to my mom. That night, I was told in no certain terms that I needed to check signals with her from then on out. There were times when I had to let my laundry pile up on account of no convenient time for me to do laundry without having to seek permission to do so.

I'm more or less the same way with showers. I restrict mine to a time that won't create conflict for anyone else. There were times when I would take my shower at a time that was later than was appropriate and had been reprimanded for that. These days, if it's after a certain time, and I haven't had a shower because of the dishwasher running, I have gotten distracted with something, or for some other reason, I simply take a pass on the shower. If I'm lucky, I might take one in the day, but for the most part, my showers are taken at night. (If I do a daytime shower, it would have to be when I have the day off and nobody else is home.) If it means going multiple days without a shower, so be it. I also remember one time when I was living with my dad when I was in the shower, but because it turned out that he needed to use the bathroom, I had to hurry up and even cut some corners with said shower. (And as I was often homebound due to a combination of needing to be more or less available to him and not to mention the "schedules" of busywork that he and I were both doing at the time, I was lucky if I showered more than once or twice a week.)

In closing, I feel that what's convenient for me conflicts with what's convenient for someone else, their convenience should take precedence.