Last week I asked for advice about buying the world’s best drying rack for laundry. Thanks to everybody who contributed. I haven’t acted on that advice, and hurray for my laziness! Because Chelsea came by and left this comment:
I recently spent a good amount of time looking into the various clothesline and drying rack options since my college (Pomona College in Claremont, California) is going to purchase some for student use and I wanted to get the best available racks for us.
In my research, I was shocked to find that there is NO good website explaining all the different clotheslines and drying rack options, so I made my own!
Another tiny win for the participatory web. That is one robust wiki on drying your clothes.
For the past seven years, I’ve probably used a clothes dryer once a month. I wish this were out of some kind of smug ecological sensitivity, but it’s more practical than anything. Here’s why?
- We lived in Ireland, and we had a combination washer/dryer device in our flat. This is a ridiculous, useless invention. The washer part works okay, but the dryer function doesn’t merit that term. You’d have more success if you microwaved your moist clothes.
- Since a massive growth spurt in my teens, I’m paranoid about my clothes being too short (in particular, my trousers). It’s irrational, I know, and I’m excellent at doing laundry, so I almost never shrink my clothes. Still, hanging clothes to dry is the safest way to go.
- We only have a washing machine in Malta. We dry clothes using the nearest star to the Earth.
In short, we’ve just gotten into the habit of hanging clothes on a rack to dry. That fact that the dryer is a big, idle electricity sucker is just a bonus.
Now, I’d imagine that a family with young children produces a crapload of laundry, so it would be more difficult to go dryer-free. And it’d be pretty unpleasant to go to the laundry mat, wash your clothes, and then cart them home, dripping wet, to hang up.
So I’m not ready to be prescriptive on this one just yet. Riddle me this: why do we need clothes dryers?
Last month I was at my friend’s place in France, doing some laundry. Her washing machine lit up like a cheap stereo, which struck me as awesomely French.
There was a dial on her washing machine with big numbers like 3000, 6000 and 1200. I believe these were measures of ‘tr/min’ (as per this photo of a washing machine brand called ‘Malice’). Is that ‘tour’, the French word for ‘turn’? It doesn’t really matter–I assumed it referred to revolutions per minute.
I was baffled as to what to set the machine for, and craved some less specific settings like “linen”, “wool” or “super-wash”. I’ve been doing laundry for over 20 years, and have no idea what speed the average washer barrel revolves at.
Is Five Right for Chicken?
Fast-forward to our villa here in Gozo. We’ve got a great gas range. Here are the controls for the oven:
That’s a timer on the left, and the temperature setting on the right. As you can see, you set the oven to a temperature between 1 and 8.
Here I have the reverse problem. I want less abstraction–I just want to set the damn thing to 375° to bake some chicken.
Set It to Totally Awesome, Please
The lesson is that my (and possible other’s) preferences change from device to device. I want more abstraction in my washing machine than my stove.
This is also true of software. iTunes has this hilarious setting called ‘Sound Enhancer’. It’s on a slider, and the online help says I can use this setting to “add depth and enliven the quality of your music”.
Why would anybody set this to ‘Low’? Why even bother with something called a ’sound enhancer’? Why not just set it to ‘Totally Awesome’ under the hood and get rid of the user setting altogether?
On the other hand, I want really granular control when converting WAV to MP3–probably more control than iTunes offers out of the box.
The right approach, I think, is to organize the settings in noob-journeyman-expert groups, enabling users to remove layers of abstraction if they want. That’s easy enough in software, but far trickier in the kitchen and laundry room.
We have a portable washing machine in our villa. Like many parts of Europe, there’s no dryer. We use our galaxy’s local star as our dryer, and it works very well (plus, it’s cheap!).
When they installed the washing machine a few weeks ago, they didn’t secure it to the wall. I don’t know if this is standard practice around these parts, but failing to do so has had one entertaining result.
During the spin cycle, the washer likes to go for a walk.
If left to its own devices, it will actually vibrate out into the middle of the kitchen, extending its hoses and cord straight out from the wall.
We’ve managed this phenomenon with three rubber doorstops, which seemed to really do the trick.
Until I tried to wash our sheets and my jeans in the same load. No stinkin’ doorstop was stopping that mad, vibrating beast. It tossed them aside like a mastodon throws aside irksome human hunters.
The photo shows me holding the washing machine at bay while it’s at full speed in its spin cycle. It actually took considerable effort to prevent it from walking right out the front door and down the lane to Rangers Bar.
Lesson learned: smaller loads in the washing machine. I knew enough not to put North American-sized loads in, but I still need to cut back.
This morning we went into Gozo’s main city of Rabat and paid our first visit to the citadel, which has been a fortress of one kind or another since 1500 BC. The current incarnation dates from the early 17th century, and was built by the Knights of St. John to defend the locals from raiding by French and Turkish privateers.
There’s an excellent baroque (and I mean baroque) cathedral just inside the citadel’s gates. We had a chat with a very cordial padre (you can seem him here busting out some more decorations), who pointed out the trompe-l’œil painting on the ceiling above the main dais. Apparently they ran out of money and couldn’t afford to build the cathedral’s dome, so they just painted it (with amazing effectiveness) on a round sheet of canvas above the altar. I don’t like taking photos inside churches, and it kind of has to be seen to be believed, anyway.
You’re able to walk all the way around the battlements of the citadel, and it affords an awesome view of the entire island. I took this photo looking down into the rooftops of the city below. After messing around with it in Photoshop, I’m pretty happy with the result. Maybe the treatment is a bit brash–you can decide (click for larger version):
