I've always sort of had a thing for that whole Bavarian-Biergarten-Girl look. What's not to love about pigtailed Alpine maidens with powerful forearms popeyed from lugging liters of Pilsner, short twirling skirts, and breasts wedged into a corset? A scantily-clad Fräulein bringing you beer? Add some meat roasting on a spit and you're all set. Welcome to Walhalla.
Last October we took a day trip up to the German village/eternal Christmasland of Frankenmuth, Michigan. On the drive there I said to my wife, "All I want from today is for a girl in a dirndl to bring me a beer in a giant glass shaped like a boot." Another boot filled with Franziskaner, Heidi? Well, if you insist! Unfortunately, wherever we went, the middle-aged and modestly-costumed schnitzel schleppers explained in thick Michigan accents that they didn't have boot glasses. "I guess you'll have to wait for Ye Olde Renaissance Faire to see corseted bosoms," my wife said, patting the back of my hand. I glared at her and put "dirndl pattern" on my mental list of things to google.
This past weekend we traveled across the state to western Michigan, the omphalos of New World Calvinism and the place to where my reformist Dutch forebears followed their Indian guides and finally said, "Eh, dit is goed enough." We were there once again for the annual Tulip Time Festival, arriving just in time for the big high school Klompen Kompetition. Nubile teens from Holland and the surrounding communities of Drenth, Overisel, New Holland, Vriesland, Zeeland, and Zutphen converge costumed in wooden shoes for a klomp off in the city streets. I think it must have something to do with meeting Title IX requirements, because no boys participate. Instead, the tallest girls with the broadest shoulders wear boy costumes. And fortunately, the sturdy Dutch-peasant gene pool of the region provides for an ample number of tall, broad-shouldered girls up for the task.
As the high school girls klomped on, my mother-in-law explained that the local reformed Christian high school didn't have a Klompen team for years because dancing was verboden. The administration eventually relented and the team quickly rose to become a local Klompen powerhouse. Still, it made me wonder: was there really anything sexy about Klompen?
Dutch dancing is somewhat bewildering to witness. The dancers line up for blocks and dance around in wooden shoes to music piped into the streets by a speaker stolen from an Arby's drive-thru back in 1985. The girl costumes are like a fundamentalist-Mormon take on traditional low country dress. Some even wear lace hats with wire springs called "kissers" that extend outward from the face. These were, of course, designed to prevent kissing (sort of Calvinist chastity hats). The dances have no actual basis in Dutch folk tradition, but were invented by a high school gym teacher during the Great Depression. While some dances encourage same sex hand holding (sexy), others include finger-wagging choreography that seems to discourage taking it to the next level (bummer):
Then a few hundred middle-aged women started synchronized klomping all the way down Eighth Street:
At that point the verdict was in. Those parochial school elders were correct to permit this exception to their general prohibition on dancing. They should rehabilitate sex offenders by making them watch this in prison, I whispered to my wife.
Some day, I hope to travel to the real Netherlands and ride around on a sweet bike soaking up the gratitude from the general populace that my conservative ancestors and their ilk left those levee'd shores so that marijuana could be decriminalized and hookers permitted to slowly sway in storefront windows. But until then I have Tulip Time, which I enjoy for more than just the opportunity to make fun of my own people. I also enjoy the FATBALLS:
Oh, and Tulip Time is fun for the kids:
This year both of mine appeared in full costume. This was done solely so that we might one day expose their love interests to these photos. My son's little blond mullet poking out from under his cap might be the Dutchest thing I saw all weekend.
I spent part of Friday morning scouring the racks at Bibles for Belgium (my favorite Holland thrift store). Just before leaving empty handed, I spotted a 1970s Volendam costume on a rack near the cash register. The size looked just right for my wife, and I would have totally been willing to spend several nickels more than the $15 asking price. It took some convincing, but she was a good sport and agreed to wear it for a photo:
Afterward, I whispered in her ear: Can we maybe take this up a bit, and add a corset?
We have always only had a single car, but this past week after feeling stranded while my wife was out in the suburbs buying godknowswhat I knew it was time to get another vehicle. The minivanasaurus didn't work out (too expensive). So I decided to trade in some empty beer bottles and buy a new ride.
Let me back up. Since we moved into this house, my wife has usually enjoyed a single 12oz bottle of beer every evening. Sometimes I even join her. Because I haven't found a store in Detroit that accepts glass bottle returns, we have been piling the empties in our basement. A few weeks ago I got lost in the dense labyrinth of brown bottles emitting a soft stench of Sierra Nevada pale ale. I couldn't find my way back to the washing machine without a ball of yarn.
I have wanted a bike for awhile now, but felt concerned that we didn't have anywhere to keep one. Recently I got an idea: I would bring back the beer bottles (worth ten cents each under Michigan's generous deposit law), buy whatever bike I could get with the money, and then park the bike where the bottles had been. There was a such a beautiful symmetry to it that I started bringing the bottles out to the car right away.
It turns out I could only return a fraction of the bottles, because under Michigan law, a store only has to provide a return for the brands it carries. I wanted to bring the bottles back to Meijer (sort of a Dutch version of Wal-Mart), because their bottle return area is right by the front door and I didn't want to face the disapproving looks from old ladies while hauling two children and a few hundred empty beer bottles through a big box store. But that meant all those bottles of lager from former Soviet-controlled nations where they still believe in vampires and bottles of India Pale Ale from obscure microbreweries had to stay in the basement, which is fine because we still may need a place to secret away any half-bovine offspring.
Once the car's trunk was full, I put bags of empties inside the car in the passenger seat and on the floor in front of and in between the kids' car seats, which Gram deftly dumped out on the ride to the store. The kids effectively turned the backseat into Scrooge McDuck's money pit if Scrooge McDuck was actually Barney from The Simpsons. You'd think the smell would have been unbearable but I actually preferred the smell of flat, ancient beer to our car's every day odor. With the view out the passenger-door window partially obscured by a giant bag of beer bottles, I half expected to be pulled over by the cops, and I looked forward to explaining why my son was sucking on an empty bottle of Corona. CPS would have totally been deluged by an avalanche of empties had they tried to extricate my children.
We made it to the Meijer in Dearborn and pulled into a parking spot right next to one of those cart corrals, where I proceeded to fill two giant carts, leaving room for Gram to sit in the basket of one while I loaded several 12-pack boxes under each. Did I mention it was raining? Yeah. Hard. So I'm pushing a cart loaded down with 200 beer bottles and my son while pulling another one filled with 250 bottles as my daughter clung to my legs between the carts screaming about her wet feet. We looked like a tribe of schizophrenic Bedouins who'd wandered into a monsoon. It took us almost half an hour just to get through the parking lot.
If you want a clear illustration of how the economy is in the shitter, spend some time in the bottle return area at Meijer in Dearborn on a rainy day. There are like twelve of those fully-automated bottle-devouring-conveyer-belt-UPC-scanning machines working in 24-hour shifts to swallow every bottle some desperate laid-off auto worker and his family bring in to exchange for some kielbasa or whatever. There were puddles of rainwater and whatever was left at the bottom of ten thousand bottles of soda or beer on the floor and everything was sticky. Naturally, my son wanted to get out of the shopping cart and I had nearly 500 bottles to feed into a machine so naturally I let him wander around picking up bottle caps and gazing upon them with awe. I figured whatever he caught would just toughen him up for the Swine Flu. Juniper and I worked in tandem; she stood in the main part of the cart putting bottles into the machine and staring into it while asking me a million questions:
"What is this robot going to do with all these bottles?"
"Why is this robot going to give us money for these bottles?"
"Who lives back there?"
Meanwhile, people were lining up behind us because there was only one glass bottle machine and they all had a 4-pack of Mike's Hard Lemonade or a sixer of MGD so I started negotiating with them to let me buy their empties if they'd just stop breathing down our necks. One old fellow wasn't selling or didn't speak English or something so I doubled our efforts as he huffed and puffed until the machine filled up and stopped accepting bottles. We had to hunt down the developmentally-disabled guy who empties the machines and then we kept going until it filled up again.
Ultimately, we ended up with $46.30. Totally worth the six hours or so spent on the effort, don't you think? On the way home, I called a lady in Southwest Detroit about a bike I'd seen advertised on craigslist, and she gave me her address. We ended up driving around the most desolate part of Detroit I'd ever seen, all junkyards and traintracks until I called her again to get more directions. "Are you the scrapyard with the big red sign?" I asked her.
"No, we're the scrapyard with the big yellow building."
Once there, she unlocked four padlocks on an outbuilding and rolled out a beautiful, all-original 1964 Schwinn Racer that was just rusty enough that no one will ever bother stealing it. I like fancy bikes as much as the next guy in tapered pants, but where we live if you buy a fancy bike there's a very good chance you won't have it very long. "How much are you asking for it?" I said.
"Fifty bucks," came her reply.
"All I have is $46.30," I said, which she accepted unhappily.
If only she knew what we'd gone through to get it.
This year we decided it was important to expose Juniper to a little bit more of her own culture, you know, so she could fully learn to appreciate it ironically. It turns out the totally awesome Dutch Theme Park is just the beginning of the celebration of Dutch culture in Wood's hometown: this past weekend we went to the annual "Tulip Time" festival in Holland, Michigan, a week where tulips line every street in varying shades of vibrant color and you see elderly women checking their mailboxes dressed as nineteenth-century Dutch peasants. At several points throughout the week, the streets are closed and people in Dutch costumes sweep the streets and dance. Despite a lifetime of resentment against the Dutch, Wood's mother bought her Dutch granddaughter the same style of costume she danced in when she was in high school (Isle of Marken). The festival usually drives Wood's step dad to extremes of curmudgeonity, but despite being in the absolute dregs of his third round of chemotherapy, he came with us to enjoy the fine weather and his granddaughter smelling tulips dressed like this:
We decided to start the day with a robust Dutch meal. Now, the only Dutch food I knew before Saturday was the pickled herring and pan-fried livers soaking in maple syrup that my Dutch grandfather frequently slurped down with gusto during my childhood. But for $13.50 I got a mediocre meal of boerenkool stamppot metwurst, groentesope met ballejes, saucizenbroodjes, croquetten and a raisin oliebollen for dessert, served by elderly methodists. One thing I'll say about the Dutch: their food looks exactly the same coming in as it does going out.
We then walked into town, where an appropriate welcome had been prepared for me:
The streets were already filled with Klompen dancers, with their wooden shoes and traditional outfits. The local schools have teams of competitive Dutch dancers much like normal schools have cheerleaders or field hockey teams. The parochial schools even have freshman and j.v. squads. Many of the performers came from homeschooling coalitions. I am so proud of my people. For some of them, even strict fundamentalist private schools are too liberal.
I know what you're thinking: this dude is totally wearing a wig. Nobody looks like that much like the kid on the paint can in real life! But that hair is very real. . . and she does.
This poor girl is thinking: "Man, I just know that asshole is going to make fun of my boyfriend on his blog. . ." I do think this dance move is exactly how Wood was tricked into touching her first penis.
Just as I was taking this picture of how pretty some Dutch men are, the wooden shoe this fellow was wearing went flying and hit some old lady in her eye. That was the highlight of my week.
I think the Mennonites come to Tulip Time just so they can look at all the Dutch people and say, "Jeez, check out all the weirdos!"
This girl is also wearing the Isle of Marken traditional costume. When I showed Juniper this picture, she said, "That's Juney when she's a big girl?" And I responded, "Only if I spend the next fifteen years feeding you a steady diet of fundamentalist Calvinism and saucizenbroodjes. Only then will you have the excuse to be this surly when I dress you up in that costume."
You know those signs from the old days that said,"No Irish Need Apply"? "No Wooden Shoes" is the modern-day equivalent for my people. And expecting you to buy something in order to use the toilet? How could they be so cruel?
My wife spent her teen years in a place called Holland, Michigan, home of the annual "Tulip Time" Festival, a mysterious place called "Windmill Island," the original Russ' Restaurant, and reputably more churches per capita than any other place on earth. The local high school's mascot is the "Dutchmen." When Wood was a cheerleader she wore red underwear under her skirt that said "Dutch" in white letters across her ass. Wood's mother grew up in Holland, one of eight children in one of the few Catholic families in town. Wood and her mother both frequently dealt with blonde, blue-eyed Dutch Christian Reformed people telling them that they were "Catholic, not Christian." This drove them both nuts. When I first started dating Wood, her mom and stepdad would constantly make remarks about the "goddamn Dutch people" in Holland. It brought a secret thrill to me knowing that my mother in law's good little Irish girl was dating one of them. Wood's parents would have been so much happier if she would have just brought home a black guy. But finally I was the bad boy. A genetically-ingrained frugality and loads and loads of fundamentalist guilt may not be quite the same as a leather jacket and a motorcycle, but I worked with them best I could to appear a mildly dangerous Dutchman.
And now my mother in law's granddaughter is part them. Moo-hoo-ha-ha-ha.
In some ways though, I feel my mother in law's annoyance with my people is completely justified. I find repugnant so much of my forebears' fundamentalist Calvinism and intolerance. As I've written before, the Dutch people in western Michigan "left the Netherlands because the government was granting rights to Jews and Catholics and their church had grown too liberal. They are perhaps the only immigrant community in North America who left their native land because the government there had grown too tolerant for them." Sure there are tons of cool people in the Netherlands today, and I can't help but wonder if the country is so awesome because they shipped all their assholes off to Michigan in the last couple centuries.
But the Dutch in southwestern Michigan are not without their redeeming cultural institutions, such as the aforementioned tulip festival and, well, the restaurant with telephones on every table so you can call the kitchen yourself and avoid having to tip the waitress. But above all else, the mecca of Dutchdom in Holland is Dutch Village, a theme park designed to resemble a late-eighteenth-century Dutch town. At Dutch Village you can have a pair of "klompen" (wooden shoes) made for you, you can shop for Delft pottery, or dine at the Hungry Dutchman cafe. I have tried some traditional Dutch breakfast dish called balkenbrij, which turned out to be cow and sheep and pig's livers ground into a hash and fried on the griddle, and the waitress told me everyone she'd seen order it had eaten it with maple syrup. I'm sure it warmed the cockles of my grandfather's ghost's heart to see me eating that. That dude just could never get enough liver.
It does cost $10.00 to get into Dutch Village, but the website has convenient answers to the following frequently asked questions:
What are your admission rates? Do you offer any discounts on admission? What if it rains? Do I have to pay admission if I just want to shop? What is included in the admission price? Am I allowed to bring a picnic lunch?
Apparently these are the type of questions that Dutch people ask. Over and over again.
A little more than a week ago, we visited Holland (Wood's mom still lives there). I ignored the little Dutch boy on my shoulder and forked over that $10.00 without even trying for the AARP discount, so Juniper and I were able to spend an hour or so in Dutch village. Wood went wandering around the nearby outlet mall, but later she snuck into Dutch Village without paying. And I'm the cheap one? Well yes, because when she did it I was so freaking proud of her. I haven't uploaded photos in a week, so I'm just getting to these now:
I like the little Dutch boy on this bathroom sign because he's clearly got to go himself. Either that or he already has, and he has just filled his pants. Remember back when people "Dutch rolled" their pants? That's what's keeping it all in.
It's just like Amsterdam, without the hookers and pot. If Amsterdam was built on ten acres in the middle of a vacant outlet mall's parking lot next to a state highway downwind of a Wal-Mart.
My mom has an identical picture of me as a baby sitting in this same stork's bundle. As far as my parents were concerned, this experience was all I needed to know about how babies were made. It's the most we ever talked about sex.
The best thing about the southwestern Michigan is that there is mid-century Herman Miller molded fiberglass everywhere you look and nobody knows that it's cool. consider this wheelchair. I would practically chew off my own leg to get to ride around in one of those. It's an Eames shell chair on bicycle wheels with a footrest. It's like a Duchamp sculpture you can get pushed around in and you never have to worry about your next door neighbor ordering it from Design Within Reach. When I'm old I am totally moving to Dutch Village.
Since this moment, in all of Juniper's dreams, wherever she goes, she is pulled around in a little cart by a friendly dog. I have no doubt about that.
One of the attractions is the Frisian Farmhouse, which is a historically accurate farmhouse filled with old Dutch crap, like the nineteenth-century Bugaboo above and this Stokke Kinderzeat prototype:
It's like a little baby prison, with a pisspot you can change every four hours or so. Modern Dutch design could learn a thing or two from the past. It's really too bad that only the good folks at Graco are still in touch with the important concept of baby imprisonment.
In the background of this picture, you can see some old ladies dressed up in traditional Dutch costumes. Dutch Village is swarming with these old ladies. There are some younger ones too, and they all have real Dutch accents. In the farmhouse I encountered a young college student from the Netherlands who tried to tell me all about the traditional Dutch wares around him. Judging by his stoic performance, they clearly don't encounter a lot of visitors to Dutch Village who are there solely for the kitsch value. He was so serious with me, staying in character, that I started asking all these questions like, "Did you do something bad in the Netherlands? Is that why you're here?" and "Do the bosses make you sleep here?" That finally cracked his shit up. Then he had to go do this klompen dancing thing that totally made me lose respect for him. You just can't take a guy seriously when he's wearing giant wooden shoes.
Juniper was so pissed that these piles of fake cheese couldn't be toppled over. Believe me, she tried.
One of the best things about Dutch Village is the ability to check out a goat and walk with it throughout the entire park. Unfortunately this goat weighed twice as much as Juniper and had his own singular agenda.
This old pipe organ provides the music for the klompen dancing. Juniper stood there long after the dancing was over, tapping her palm and demanding "more, more more." I almost bought her some size 4 wooden shoes right then, I tell ya.
Here is a sculpture commemorating Pieter, the little boy who stuck his finger in the dike to save the Wal Mart, the Steak'n'Shake, and the Pier One Imports.
My first real job was washing dishes and bussing tables at Russ' Restaurant, where I earned a busboy's wage of $2.65 an hour. At the end of the night, I was supposed to get a ten-percent cut of each waitress' tips, which they would leave for me in a little white paper bag under the time clock. Sometimes a paper bag would only have a quarter and two dimes in it. Other times I might see $1.65 or more. With five waitresses on the floor, I eventually had to complain to the manager, Rod, that I wasn't making minimum wage. He smiled at me and told me that he, too, had started as a busboy at a Russ' restaurant in Holland, Michigan, but he worked hard and didn't complain and look at him now: he drives a Cadillac. He said if I worked hard, I might expect the same.
In other words, he told me to shut the fuck up and get back to my sink full of soggy french fries and greasy water that smelled like thousand island dressing and meat. One time, one of the waitresses came up behind me, slipped her arms under mine to grab my nipples and whisper in my ear: "what would you do if I got naked and climbed into that sink right there?" I looked at the foetid detritus of several dozen house salads and chicken bones floating in the murky, malodorous sludge. "Um. . ." I said, and she cackled and went back out on the floor.
God she scared the crap out of 16-year-old me.
One of my friends ended up regularly fucking her out in the parking lot during their 15-minute breaks. Restaurants are such hornet's nests of sexual depravity. When she cheated on him with another line cook my friend and a buddy got really drunk and broke into his house and tore it apart. They said they would have killed him had he been there. They both got probation.
Do I think the waitresses were stiffing me on the tips? Probably. Most of them were in their forties, supporting both their broken families and their addiction to Basic Ultra Light 100's on the same $2.65 plus tips I was making. Their nametags said things like Mabel and Rita. To their credit, Russ' was a Dutch restaurant whose most loyal customers usually needed to be wheeled in from a nursing home van. While pushing my bus cart around the restaurant I always had to be careful not to knock the tubes out from the various oxygen tank carts that lined the aisles. If most elderly folks on fixed incomes are frugal, you can imagine what old Dutch people are like. Four old Dutchies would each order (on separate checks) a $1.65 cup of ham-n-bean soup, each ask for six packs of saltines, and then each leave a dime and a nickel for a tip. I know all this because I used to clear their tables. Rumor was that the first Russ' restaurant on Chicago Drive in Holland, Michigan had telephones installed in every booth so customers could call the kitchen and order their food directly with the cooks. This was set up so no one would ever have to leave a tip.
Russ' mascot was Russ, a Dutch boy more annoying than the bowl-headed chap on the paintcans, a clog-wearing punk carrying a gigantic burger through the tulips as though it were his reward for sticking his finger in the goddamn dike. I'll never forget one evening in July when the manager pulled me away from my buscart and told me he had a "special duty" for me that evening. He had a big gap between his top front teeth and he smiled when he pulled some red and blue clothes and a pair of wooden shoes from a bag. "Look what I've got," he said with aplomb. "You get to be the Russ tonight!"
I should have walked out right then.
But I was a weak-willed sonofabitch back in those days, scared of a guy named Rod with a clip-on tie and a ten-year-old Cadillac. I put on the pants, the hat, the neckerchief, and the wooden shoes (which were about two sizes too small) and held a giant sign that said, 3-piece chicken dinner, w/ fries & slaw, only $4.99! in front of the restaurant on main street, certain that every girl in my high school was driving by, laughing. People yelled things. Flipped me off. Honked. When it was a slow night and nobody needed any tables bussed, Rod would pull out the Russ costume to remedy it.
To this day, whenever I see someone dressed as a banana or a hotdog, or some woman dressed up like the statue of liberty outside an accountant's office during tax time, I am haunted by the familiar look of quiet desperation in their eyes.
In a comment to Wood's post below, SF blogger Llamaschool expressed an interest in a washer and dryer that plugs into a wall outlet and uses the sink as its water source. Llamaschool clearly hasn't seen our appliances. I would gladly walk down a dozen flights of stairs to reach a real washer/dryer.
When we learned Wood was pregnant, she gave me an order: "no more laundromats. Get me a washer/dryer or find me a new apartment." I pleaded with the landlord to put a proper voltage hookup in the garage and offered to leave the appliances behind after we moved out, but he refused. He suggested an in-apartment sink hookup model.
I didn't choose "Dutch" as my nom de blog because of some affinity for Ronald fucking Reagan. I am ethnically half Dutch and therefore genetically a cheap bastard. In the world of ethnic stereotypes, the Dutch make the Jews look like profligate spendthrift Irishmen. I come from a long line of intolerant tightwads. The Dutch Calvinists who settled the part of Michigan I'm from left the Netherlands because the government was granting rights to Jews and Catholics and their church had grown too liberal. They are perhaps the only immigrant community in North America who left their native land because the government there had grown too tolerant for them. And man, are they cheap.
So instead of doing the right thing, I did the Dutch thing. Instead of going to Sears or Home Depot or something, I scoured craigslist for weeks looking for a used apartment-sized washer/dyer combo for $200 or less. After several weeks of looking, I found one. We had to drive out past the foggy curtain of the outer sunset on a cold night, and when we got there, what did we find? Two sweaty Greek teenagers, one of whom talked like a used car salesman while the other made erotic hand gestures towards a washing machine like one of Barker's beauties on the Price Is Right. The salesman gave me this long-winded story about how they bought the appliances brand new and used them for a couple years but now their mother lives with them and they need bigger ones (as if to pepper the tale with evidence, a sharp mannish-voice barked something at them in Greek from upstairs). We fell for it hook-line-and-sinker, baby, wrote a check and lugged them out to my car.
I should have known it was a scam. Even though it was a Sunday night, somehow my check had already cleared the next morning. Plus, while I technically only know Ancient Greek, I swear at one point the Greeks smiled at each other, nodded towards us and mouthed the word for "suckers." Apparently, these two Greeks have quite a scam going. They pick up ancient, broke-down appliances from the sidewalks and "repair" them. The second time we washed a load, one of the agitator belts snapped. That sounds like a very knowledgeable conclusion, but at the time I was fucking clueless about how a washing machine worked. When I unscrewed the metal back from the machine, I wouldn't have been surprised if there was a little gnome on a stationary bike back there. I was that clueless. So with my traditional DIY spirit (read: cheapness), I set off on an internet journey to learn washing machine repair, or should I say, belt replacement. It was curious, because I didn't need to "replace" a belt at all. The agitators weren't connected with a solid rubber belt like they should have been. The Greeks had "repaired" the machine by using a scrunchy. Yes, they stretched a scrunchy between the knobs on the backs of the agitators and sealed the back of the machine up before they sold it to us. It took six trips to the hardware store, but eventually I was able to find a real belt. It worked fine.
A few weeks later, the dryer stopped working. Another belt problem? You betcha! When I removed the back of the dryer, I learned they had replaced the broken belt that went around the tumbler with a fucking shoelace. Six more trips back and forth to the hardware store, and I was able to repair the dryer. It still works.
Let me put this in perspective. At my job, they somehow charge the clients $285 an hour for what I do. I spent at least eight hours trying to figure out how to fix those damn machines. That's $2280 of my time. It's an interesting thing about the Dutch. We have no concept of the term "opportunity costs." A Dutchman will never do "Wash'n'fold." This is also beyond his comprehension.
During the course of my internet research, I learned that our machine models were last manufactured in 1973. That means they were at least four years older than I am. The interesting thing about these machines is that the wash and spin cycles are performed in different compartments, meaning you have to take your load out of the washing compartment, put it in the spinner, drain the washing compartment, fill it with rinse water, run a rinse cycle, then put the load in the spinner again to spin. It is a very wet process. And I just did seven loads. That's seven wash cycles, seven rinse cycles, and fourteen spin cycles. This is some Laura Ingalls Wilder shit.
And during the last few spin cycles, I could tell that the spinner motor is on its last leg. I am not fucking with that shit.
I can't wait for the day when we buy a nice house that has room and hookups for a nice new set of appliances, and I can post an ad on craigslist: "Almost new washer/dryer combo, great for small apartments." $175.
A dutchman understands depreciation value.
