Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

From a stroll around the neighborhood yesterday.
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We made another foray to the appliance bazaars Wednesday, this time to Sears, to gather more data in aid of replacing our washer and dryer. Again, there was the bewildering array of models and features, and we’d done only minimal research since our trip to Lowe’s last weekend. I had pretty much decided, though, that I wanted to focus on the energy-efficient front-loading models.

The salesman immediately showed us to a pair of sleek, midnight-blue things that had flashing lights and actually played a musical little “zing” when they powered up, acting more like pinball machines or video games than the stalwart appliances we thought we were shopping for.

We listened politely as he described their arcane functions, then demurred and ratcheted down a couple of levels to a set that didn’t cost as much as an SUV. As it happened, they were having a sale that ended that very day and, while I’d like to say that I was rational and organized in my approach to this purchase, I felt Mrs. Perils starting to hyperventilate again, and I certainly had better things to do with my time, so we just bought the damn things.

The day that they were to be delivered, Mrs. Perils expressed just a bit of sentimental feelings about these prosaic old boxes that have served us, with only one service call, for 35 years. Here they are feeling the full brunt of our betrayal.
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And here are their replacements newly installed. Our laundry room is on the second floor, and our stairway takes a pretty tight 90-degree turn on the way up. I’m surprised the installers never made a peep when they apprehended the enormity of the task.

The old washer and dryer were pretty simple machines. You pretty much just turned them on and off. The new ones look a lot like a 747 cockpit. Mrs. Perils went to a college famous for its engineering curriculum, but her degree was in Fine Arts. She’s been poring over the manuals, though, and we may do our first load of laundry tomorrow. Foam the runways.

Our son left last week for a month or so of rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park, and it’s causing both of us a few pangs as we remember our trip there last January, drying out in the high desert and marveling at the otherworldly geology and flora.

You can get a glimpse by viewing my posts in the Joshua Tree - Jan, 2006 category at the right. If you want to skip the text and just look at pictures, here is a slideshow.

It was actually sort of warmish, almost springlike, here in Seattle over the weekend. But still.

I’ve been reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, and in it there’s a terrific description of a house slipping into decay (a sensation abetted by the onset of monsoon season, which, of course, would be an entirely foreign experience to us here in Seattle):

Rainy season beetles flew by in many colors. From each hole in the floor came a mouse as if tailored for size, tiny mice from the tiny holes, big mice from big holes, and the termites came teeming forth from the furniture, so many of them that when you looked, the furniture, the floor, the ceiling, all seemed to be wobbling…In his bed slung like a hammock on broken springs, leaks all around, the judge lay pinned by layers of fusty blankets. His underwear lay on top of the lamp to dry and his watch sat below so the mist under the dial might lift-a sad state for the civilized man. The air was spiked with pinpricks of moisture that made it feel as if it were raining indoors as well, yet this didn’t freshen it. It bore down thick enough to smother, an odiferous yeasty mix of spore and fungi, wood smoke and mouse droppings, kerosene and chill.

While we’re not quite at that extremity here at Chez Perils, we nevertheless seem to be at a fulcrum point in the life cycle of the structure, its furnishings (and perhaps its inhabitants). We bought the house in 1975, and substantially rebuilt it in 1981, adding a second story, new wiring and plumbing and lots of insulation. At that time, I went for a lot of middle-of-the-road furnishings, etc., because I was reluctant to overspend, in case we wanted to, or had to, sell and move before values caught up with us. This was the year that Microsoft formed a Washington corporation, and Starbuck’s had like 5 stores in Seattle. Well before the flood tide of money that would feed a two-decades-and-counting storm-surge of real estate values in Seattle and environs. Silly me.

So, we’re at a point where some things need to be replaced. A couple of weeks ago, I had two new toilets installed for about $900. A little pricey for unprepossessing porcelain thrones that offer nothing in the way of massage or hydrotherapy, but these seem to be technological marvels in how little water they use, and how thoroughly they perform the prosaic single task we ask of them.

Next up, it seems, will be a new washer/dryer combo. Our current set came with the house when we moved in in 1975, and had probably been there for a couple years before that. They’re avocado green, and came from Penney’s. The dryer has taken to sounding like a punch-press, emitting a loud pounding sound with each revolution. The Sears repairman scoffed at the possibility of finding a replacement bearing, so the clock on its replacement is now ticking off tenths of a second.

So, yesterday, Mrs. Perils peeled me away from the Ohio State-Michigan basketball game at halftime for a pilgrimage to Lowe’s to look at appliances or, as the bilingual signage so zestily called them, “electrodomesticos”. We don’t do the “big box” thing very often - they’re all pretty much in the ‘burbs, and it wearies the mind just to think of driving out there for recreation. I think yesterday was the second time in a Lowe’s for both of us. In addition, Mrs. Perils hates to shop, for anything, and after about 10 minutes she was starting to to turn purple and casting a panicked eye for the exit.

We finally flagged down Cecil, a rare big-box employee that actually had some expertise in the products. Even if most of that expertise was in the form of personal anecdotes about how he did the laundry in his house while his wife was in the hospital for liver surgery and full of morphine and admonishing him not to leave the white clothes in the freezer too long or he’d just have to bake them again to get the wrinkles out.

It was helpful, though, to get the lowdown on why front-loading washers were more efficient and versatile, and how different features either were or weren’t particularly useful. He steered us to a series of models called the Whirlpool Duet Fabric Care System. From what I can glean, calling it a “fabric care system” adds about $500 to the total price. Whatever, it gives us something tangible to use as a reference point for further shopping, since our prior knowledge of the technology was limited to which rocks to beat cotton and which to beat wool on laundry day down at the creek.

There is some urgency in the process, as my office is directly beneath the laundry room, and when the dryer is on I feel like Jake Gyllenhaal must have felt in Donnie Darko just before the plane engine crashed into his bedroom.

If any of you has any advice to lend, please, please, throw me a bone in the comments.