The Great Dryer Drama of 2010 (So Far....)

I had originally planned on sharing something entirely different today, but I decided I had to share my dryer dilemma with you instead. I am hoping it may save you an hour or two of anguish someday! Saturday is my typical catch up the laundry day, and things were going pretty well until I went downstairs this afternoon to quickly change the laundry over when I discovered a HUGE catastrophe! Someone (who I discovered later was my seventeen year old, WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER) had left a brand spanking new package of gum in their back pocket (I swear I checked every pocket). The package of gum made it through the washing machine, and unfortunately, the dryer. At some point in the dryer it fell out of the pocket and melted all over the inside of the dryer. There were streaks and globs of gum goo all over the drum! Luckily, the gum did not do any irrevocable damage to the load of laundry ( and hey, those Levi's did smell minty fresh). After my head stopped spinning (and I questioned why the good Lord had sent me the children out of the Heaven's scratch and dent bin ), I knew I had to do something quickly before the dryer was completely ruined (which would totally ruin the WNWN challenge!). I turned the dryer on for a minute to warm the gum up a little bit, and then took a plastic spatula (the kind you use to spread mud on the wall when you are taping and mudding sheetrock) and starting scraping the globs off of the drum. When I had gotten the big chunks of gum off , I took a green scrub pad and my bottle of homemade cleaner and started in on the sticky streaks of gum. I sprayed my wonder cleaner on the mess (the combination of ammonia and alcohol broke down the gum) and started scrubbing. With a little elbow grease and a lot of scrubbing it came off! I did have to spray some areas twice to get the last of the sticky residue off, but HALLELUJAH it worked! Tragedy was adverted, and the children (one in particular) will live to see another day!