Oh man! Not even a week has passed.
When we moved into this house, we were looking forward to its features, more features than we'd ever seen or thought we'd be able to afford. But this is the good thing about renting in a small town in the southeast: you can get a house! Full of things! Like a dishwasher--a full-size dishwasher, not just the Manhattan-scaled version in the old place that would frequently short out and pop orange sparks when opened. A fridge that was not salvaged from the dank and dirty basement and freckled with rust. Not one! but two! bathrooms, in tile colors best described as Putty Flesh and Thruway Bathroom Yellow. A big yard, which you get to watch your boyfriend mow every few weeks while you pick up poop and sticks and pinecones.
But what it didn't have was laundry. There were laundry hookups in the Murder Room, sure, and my landlords said they generally rented out machines with the property, but they currently owned ten houses and nine washer-dryer sets. For a few months, then, we made do at the laundromat, but eventually we realized that we'd like to be able to do the wash here, and there might have been a time* when I found myself washing the sheets in the bathtub (so nice to have two to choose from!) by stomping them, hillbilly-style, and then hanging them out to dry, and then the hours ticked down and it became apparent that the thunderstorm rolling in off the coast had other plans, and I ended up dumping the sheets into the oven and letting them steam before calling the whole thing ridiculous** and bringing them to a friend's house.
So then I started researching washers and dryers, an experience that can be summarized thusly as Let's Discover that You are Poor and Dull. GOD IS RESEARCHING APPLIANCES EVER BORING. SO BORING. Everything that is nice is expensive, shockingly so, and you have to sift through eight hundred consumer reviews and ask yourself if you trust Toni from San Diego or what this BigMama in Texas means when she writes In terms of miles it's been to the Moon and back!, and then you are scouring the internet for coupons and offers, and zzzzzzzzzzzzWHO CARES THIS IS SO STUPID CAN'T I JUST WAKE UP TOMORROW AND DISCOVER THAT THE APPLIANCE FAIRY HAS BROUGHT ME SHINY THINGS.
We sifted through Craigslist, too, but everything was old and surprisingly expensive (we noticed this when we were looking for a grill--memo to Georgia: learn how to price things, and maybe stop taking photos of products you are trying to sell in a junkyard with mean dogs skulking in the background), and we'd have to rent a truck to get anything to our place and at the end of the day it would be roughly the same amount to do that than it would be to buy the absolute cheapest versions from Lowe's and have them delivered, so long as I was willing to go to the post office and pretend to be a new mover in order to get myself one of those fancy 15% coupons. So I took a deep breath, and I bought a washer and a dryer, which made me feel like a grownup and sort of sad*** all at the same time.
The washer and dryer came yesterday, and I ended up having to go not once! but twice! to Lowe's to get the right hoses and ductwork and worm clamps, the latter of which I had actually had to have the nice, Southern Georgia-accented delivery man spell for me--worm clamp, right, no, of course I should have assumed that they would have the same name as, well, a worm--and then by the time I got back the delivery guy said, You might have a problem.
Whazzat, I said.
Well, you got a range outlet here, which is what they did in older homes, but I've been runnin' the dryer and it just don't feel hot.
Hmm, I said, and looked at the range outlet as if I would have any fucking clue as to what the problem might be. Well, the last folks here definitely had a dryer, so I would think it would work.
Oh, could be that it's just not runnin' enough power. Call your landlord and see if he knows, or if it's not that, it could be the dryer and we'll come back out and get you a new dryer. Which, you know, is technically good news but all I could think was, OH BOY ANOTHER FUN AFTERNOON OF TALKING ABOUT DRYERS SHOOT ME IN THE FACE.
Will do, gotcha, I said, I'll give Charlie a jingle, because whenever I have to deal with people who are from here, for some reason I start talking like a radio announcer from the 1950s, and then he left and I sat around for a while and thought about how stupid the whole thing was. Then I decided to do a test load, to see what the problem might be, and then I decided to make an event of it, so I put a bunch of towels into the washer and mashed all the dials, and then I sat there and listened to the washer, trying to figure out how to determine the heat of the dryer. I thought about sitting on it, to see if it would feel warm, but even I am not so stupid as to think that the Scientific Butt Method would be the most precise.
And then, I channeled my father and Alton Brown, and I pulled out the digital probe thermometer, and figured out how to nest it in the lint trap, and then I sat there and drank a beer and watched the temperature go from 100 to 147 degrees, and at one point, I realized it was cycling up and down, and I actually said aloud, Well, that's interesting! It must cycle from the low temp to the high temp, and at moment I knew my destiny was inevitable. It was a Thursday evening and I was drinking, alone, in the laundry room, watching the temperature of the clothes dryer on a digital meat thermometer.
Next week, I suppose, I'll buy a fishing boat and retrofit it, using a design I hand-sketched on a piece of DuPont graphing paper while drinking Maker's Mark and listening to Graceland, and then my metamorphosis will be complete. I suppose I should give the B some warning, but then again, I think he has seen the future, and he knows that it wears safety glasses.
*last Sunday
**as someone normal might have done hours earlier, with the whole hillbilly-stomping thing
***things I own now, that I thought I never would: lawnmower, washing machine, dryer, an assortment of drill bits
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