Sans dryer

If Laura was able to spend 5 years in damp & humid Japan with no clothes dryer, surely I can manage in Tucson, one of the most arid places in the US, right? The climate in the region where Laura lived in Japan was like Seattle in the winter and Miami in the summer. How she got anything dry, I don’t know.

Not that I originally planned to be without a dryer. The minute I knew we were going to be under contract for the new house in Tucson, I ordered a washer & dryer. I ordered right away because I knew there were delays due to covid. Sure enough, the delivery date was pushed way out.

We had no washer and dryer when we arrived, but I had a delivery date of mid-November. It hadn’t changed for a month, so I was tempted to believe it. Two days before delivery, they pushed it out by another month.

I had already been without a washer and dryer for nearly two weeks. I was not going to be able to go another month without figuring in a trip or two to the laundromat. Noooo! That would not be my favorite outing in the best of times. Definitely not what I want to do during covid.

The delivery dates didn’t really seem to mean anything. I wondered if they had no idea when the washer and dryer would be in stock and were just stringing me along, a month at a time. I called to ask, and the customer service agent was vague and evasive. She reluctantly admitted that yes, she had seen delivery dates change repeatedly, maybe going on for months. Meanwhile, they had my money.

Should I cancel the order? Was there some sort of queue and I was slowly getting toward the front and if I canceled I’d be in the back of the line again? Or was this washer and dryer simply never going to happen?

I started googling the models, looking to see whether they were in stock anywhere, at any store, and to check what the other stores were saying about availability. What I found was surprising. The washer was in stock at several stores in the region (if I was willing to settle for white rather than a designer color, fine, I don’t care.)

The issue was the dryer. Most stores were showing it unavailable, not even to backorder. One store was selling it, but warned it was out of stock until late February. February! Then I knew it was the dryer holding my order up, not the washer. I realized I wasn’t going to get either my washer or my dryer until February, because they were intending to deliver them together, even though the washer is currently available.

I canceled my order. I didn’t want a washer and dryer in February. I wanted a washer now. I reordered the washer only, from a different store, and got my new white washer within two days. Yay! Wash machine!

I figured I could pick up a used dryer cheap on craigslist. I figured wrong. There appears to be a supply and demand problem. People are charging nearly-new prices for twenty-year-old dryers! No thanks.

Plus, for some reason the dryers are retailing for more than the wash machines. That just seems backwards to me. And both are so expensive right now! So instead of a brand new, gazillion-dollar dryer, for less than 50 bucks I bought the fanciest clothes drying rack I could find on Amazon.

This bad boy holds a lot of clothes, on hangers so I don’t have to mess with clothespins and then transfer the clothes to hangers. It also provides nice wide, stiff rods for draping rugs over.

It easily collapses and telescopes down for storage. It’s lightweight, easy to move around, and suitable for indoor or outdoor use. The reviews say it doesn’t blow over in the wind – we’ll have to see about that. At least we’re not in Albuquerque-level winds anymore.

Meanwhile, John had strung a clothesline. Now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. Every time we move (and John and I move a lot), I always want a clothesline. And every time he objects, on aesthetic grounds. I’ve accused him of being an elitist snob, but that doesn’t convince him. He hated clotheslines. Every time I washed bulky bedding and rugs, I would have to drape them over the patio furniture because I never had a clothesline. (Not exactly an aesthetically pleasing alternative, by the way.)

But now we didn’t have a dryer, with no solution in sight. In these extenuating circumstances, I finally got a clothesline! John was amazed how well the clothesline worked. It’s Tucson! The clothes dried as fast on the line as they would have in a dryer. John said it was like magic! Lol. I didn’t have a clothesline for 15 years and now I have a magic clothesline.

I suppose I’ll buy a dryer someday. Some cold rainy day in February I’ll decide I really ought to get a dryer. But right now I’m not even bothering to try to find one. In Tucson a dryer doesn’t seem all that necessary. Saves us a bunch of money, not to mention lowering our energy footprint.

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