High tech

Orcxance surprised me with something that is going to revolutionize my life. It’s a mini washing machine!!! I didn’t know it, but they actually sell those here in our progressive town. It’s from China, and kind of cute: about 3 feet high and a foot and a half wide. The instruction manual was actually somewhat readable, and that’s unusual for products that come with manuals.

Because of the decline of my hands, we had considered paying someone to do laundry, but after calculating what that would cost... well, it was way more than I thought. O had mentioned washing machines before, but I dismissed the idea not imagining where we would get one or how one would work with our electric situation or our tiny house. But he did his research well.

We put the machine near our shower area which is the one place in our house with a water drain to the outdoors. The machine has a little plastic tube drain that can be placed near our shower drain. We don’t use the “water introducing tube” and instead bring in buckets of water from outside to fill it up. I sometimes heat up some water and mix that in to make it warmer water, add powdered soap detergent and then the clothes. After the wash cycle is over, I let the water drain and bring in more buckets of water to refill it for the rinse cycle. Then when the rinse cycle is done I let that drain, pull out the clothes and wring them out and off to the clothesline they go!

It’s cut down my daily workload significantly, which gives me more time for other things like working on my cooking skills or spending more time reading to Molly. Normally I do laundry by hand twice a day, but I actually skipped doing laundry altogether one day, and did two days’ worth in about an hour. It was amazing! I won’t be able to use the machine for dirty or stained diapers or most of the kids’ really dirty clothes, but there’s a lot I can use it for. I’m pretty excited about it. Not because I mind doing laundry by hand; I actually kind of enjoy it, but my hands are literally being destroyed by the twice a day laundry routine and I’ve gone through all the pairs of rubber gloves already. So I’m really thankful for it.

Anyway, to continue the story of setting up the machine...The cord wasn’t nearly long enough to reach the only available power outlet. For some reason, our landlord thought having an outlet way up by the ceiling would be a good idea. Here we introduce the poorly made Chinese power strip/extension cord. You think all the cheap Chinese made products get sent to America? Wrong. The crummiest and cheaply-ist go to Africa. Hence the power strips that are always breaking. (Not a slam on the Chinese but on their crazy stuff that gets exported to the Third World.)

Well, the real problem is a combination of a faulty product and a faulty electrical system. Stuff is getting fried all the time. Orcxance found a broken power strip at work that no one wanted, and he scooped it up because he can fix stuff like that. You better believe it! He proceeded to crack open the power strip with a putty scraper and scissors, remove some screws and the burnt-out pieces, then cut the cord off a broken electric burner of ours, strip the wires and re-wire the cord from the electric burner into the power strip, complete the correct circuits and connections, close everything back up with electrical tape...then voila! The power strip worked. See photo below of broken electric burner:

So we plugged the power strip into the outlet way up high on the wall and plugged the washing machine into the power strip and my life suddenly just got easier.