fun(?) with water

last month, our washing machine broke... given, it's ancient and came with the apartment... but the fact that it's been sold from one tenant to the next for years and not part of the landlord's part of the house means it's hard to fix... there's no warranty or contract on it... it's not the landlord's responsibility... and it costs $65 just to have someone *look* at it, not to mention parts and labor... joy

needless to say, since it broke just before we were all going home for christmas, we didn't care then...

then, when we were studying for quals and just eric and mike were home in the guys house, it wasn't a problem to say "hey, can we come over and play pool with you and use your laundry room for the afternoon"

now, that all 6 guys are back in the house, and 2 have girlfriends more or less living there at least more than half of the time, it's not quite as easy to say "dude, we're coming over to do laundry"

on that note, this morning i went down to the basement and cleaned out the big sink we have down there next to the washing machine... and HAND-WASHED a load of clothes (especially when it's cold and you're running out of clean socks, you can't just let these things slide)

meanwhile, in case you've never experienced the joy of hand-washing your own clothes... to do a decent job you have to scrub them pretty well and wring them out, and all the stuff your washing machine has cycles to do... if you have a working washing machine, consider yourself lucky

as if that wasn't enough fun... my house was built in like the 1920s... we have an oil powered hot water furnace, that provides hot water to the house and provides the hot water that runs through the radiators in each room (we're talking old school and/or hungarian-esque ;-) here)... unlike in hungary where all we had to do was keep the gas-powered furnace lit, here, with oil-powered heat, every so often (once a week or so), we have to go down to the basement, and drain all the water from the machine... then run some water through to rinse out rust, and then refill... i decided to do that while scrubbing my clothes (yay multitasking)?

to drain the furnace, there's this huge long hose attached to the bottom of the furnace that goes across the basement and has its other end over a sewage hole in the corner of the basement... when you drain, the water goes through the hose and down the sewage hole... joy...

only, that's not so much what happened this morning... here i am in one corner of the basement scrubbing my clothes when i hear weird noises from clear across the other end... apparently the furnace isn't happy in the cold or something, and instead of draining a smooth stream of water through the hose, it was throwing it out in spurts... as a consequence, the hose was bouncing all over the place and spraying down half the basement with hot brown furnace water... i captured it and then jammed the free end *down* the sewage hole, but not until after quite a bit of stuff got an unexpected shower...

now my clothes are drying in our perfectly good clothes dryer, and the furnace has been drained and put back online... but all this is to say... if you have modern and/or working appliances, you really don't know how good you've got it.

end of rant (which probably wasn't that exciting anyhow! :-P)