January 3, 2009

On the Tenth Day

The Top Ten Reasons I love my new Washing Machine*

10. It is in the basement, not the kitchen.

Washerin010109

9. Only one small part of one old wall needed to come down, and then it went down with as little difficulty as a 400lb washer can while being moved through a very, very narrow house by men who have been moving a washer for two days and aren't really excited anymore. Turns out that Joe's optimism was not only well placed, but necessary.

Walloff010109

8. It holds about 3 times what Sir Washie did. Seriously. I can do every single towel in the whole house in one load. I feel like someone just gave me my life back. When the matching dryer arrives tomorrow I expect to weep openly out of sheer joy.

7. It holds so much that if you bug a kid to do their laundry, and you finally manage to convince them to go and do it, they can do all of their laundry in one load and that means that you're only going to have to fight with them about laundry and how people really do care how they smell once every week, not twice. I will lay down my life for anything that makes for fewer fights with my kids.

6. It has a warranty. For five years, this washer can only make bad noises rather than expensive ones.

5. It has a spin only cycle, which means that even though it's a front loader, I can still use it to take extra water out of fleece, yarn and handwashed woollies.

4. It makes virtually no noise. I loved Sir Washie, but the sound of him running through a cycle was something that you could hear from all over the house, and a slightly unbalanced load (and like many of us in our last months, Sir Washie was mostly unbalanced towards the end) could shake windows, scare small children and was generally louder than a 15 year old stripped of a cell phone on a Friday night just after she found out that the new boy who moved in next to her friend said that he thought her hair was " sorta nice."

3. It is a stupid crazy kind of water and energy efficient. Since we have an extremely old water supply to the house, our water pressure is sort of "limp". (So limp that we don't have a shower installed in the house and it takes 15 minutes to fill a bathtub.) This means that we can only have one water using thing on at a time... you can do laundry OR use the dishwasher, do laundry OR or have a bath, do laundry OR brush your teeth. Anything water efficient means more other water stuff works more of the time.

2. For weeks, we've been taking our laundry over to my mother-in-law's. This means that you bundle up yourself and your laundry, walk over to her place in varying types of freezing precipitation and over a variety of forms of ice, wash it, and walk back freezing your arse all the way. This is a huge chunk out of ones workday, so we've been trying not to dirty clothes. Having a washer in the house means that the next time someone spills a coffee, I can mop it up with a towel, rather than scream "Drink it off the floor! Drink it off the floor! Are you Crazy! Don't touch that towel!" like I did three days ago when the last clean towel in the house looked like it needed to be guarded with my life.

1. When Sir Washie finished a load (heaven bless him) he did nothing but lay there quietly trying to recover from the effort. When the new washer finishes - it PLAYS A SONG.** Joe thinks that the purpose of the song is to tell you that the load is finished, but I don't think so. I think it plays a song because it's just so thrilled to be serenely fulfilling its highest purpose and doing my laundry. I think it's trying to tell me that there is nothing else in the world that would satisfy it more than churning away so we can have clean gitch. I think it's delighted to be in my service and that it doesn't resent the basement (like I do.)
I think it's happy.

* my love for my new washing machine should in no way be taken as a lack of loyalty to the memory of Sir Washie. He was the best washer ever and can never really be replaced no matter how seriously slick his replacement is.

** The song is "Die Forelle" (The Trout) by Schubert. I am totally not kidding.

Posted by Stephanie at January 3, 2009 2:47 PM