Clean Clothes for Valentines Day

Hopefully, you will find this as amusing as we did. If not, you can laugh at the fact that we found this amusing. Either way, please laugh. Or at least chuckle. Or giggle maybe???

Anyway, here's the scoop: I'm not good at doing laundry by hand since we currently don't have running water in our house. Or, let me clarify that statement a bit. Sometimes water comes up out of the drain in the middle of the bathroom floor after we've poured down more than the partially frozen pipes can handle, but that's not really considered running water. That's more like standing water.

So I'm not good at doing laundry by hand. I am, however, incredibly resourceful. While studying to be an early childhood education major, that's what seemed to strike me more than anything. So much of what we did was teach information, but an almost equal thing we did was teach kids how to be resourceful. If they didn't know something, where and how could they find it?

So, knowing that I'm not good at laundry, and wishfully spending each day giving our currently lifeless washing machine a glance and reassuring thoughts ("I want to use you, but just can't." "It's not you, or me...it's the lack of water." "No, you haven't been forgotten. I would use you if I could."), the realization dawned on me. We don't have water. However, we DO have power!

This quickly became one of those situations where later I said, "But in America this would have worked." Note to self: You are not in America, you are not in America, you are not in America. Maybe I have enough memorized now.

In the States, a washing machine works in such a way that you can turn the dial to the portion of the cycle that says spin, and it will just spin. That's it. No water required.

This machine that came with the house we're renting is all in Russian. Before the first use, I translated everything with an app on our computer and drew it out just like it is on the machine. Since there was a button that seemed to let you select wash, rinse, or spin, I figured that when only the light above the spin picture was lit, then it would just spin.

Wrong!

The clothes got locked in the machine (yay front-loading washer) because it couldn't get water in...why it needed water, I have no clue! But since it couldn't get water in, it wouldn't get to spinning. and it wouldn't finish a cycle which would unlock the door in order for us to retrieve our much-needed clothes (pretty much all of both of our base layer stuff was in there).

After several hours of it just sitting in there, we tried doing different settings again. No luck. Then Matt unhooked the water hose so he could try pouring water into it. Again, no luck. Just when we were about to give up, I remembered that the little drawer where the detergent goes gets water in it in order to dilute to powder. So we chose the setting that was rinse and spin only, and started pouring in water through the drawer. IT WORKED!!!!

I was doing the happy dance while it was spinning because we wouldn't have to tell our landlords the next day, when a rap-tap-tapping came on the door. Guess who? BUSTED! Oh well, they didn't say anything about it, so guess it didn't alarm them too much. Needless to say, after they left (they were trying to fix the frozen drainage situation...still is a problem though), we both laughed at the hilarity of the situation.

But now I have a trick to get the soap and water out better than I can do by hand: rinse and spin in the machine. Hooray for being resourceful...and HAPPY BELATED VALENTINES DAY!