Check out my new spaceship!

Yo, yo, yo, yo....check this out!!! I got something new. Something brand new. Something brand new and awesome. Something...life changing. No, no, no, I didn't let some random dude with tattooing aspirations cut loose on my forehead after I got a little crazy with the jello shots. No, friends. But something almost as wild, reckless, and off the chain. Yeah, I got a new washer and dryer.

Wait, what? Did I just hear the collective steam hiss out of my readership, after I made it sound like something cool had happened and then it turned out to be something really lame..the very epitome of lameness...an announcement regarding the appliance I use to launder Big K's jockey shorts? Well, let me tell you, ya suckers. THIS IS COOL.

Let's discuss.

First off, I have a pretty huge appliance boner. For example, my sister got me an immersion blender for my birthday last year, and that was pretty much the most awesome thing she could have come up with. For fun, let's just enjoy a picture of her putting the little lady to use while looking a bit like a psycho, since I happen to have one on hand:

Okay, so, appliances. I just like shiny things with buttons that enhance my already raging domesticity. In the small appliance department, I've got to admit that I have some pretty pimped out equipment. I've asked for KitchenAid mixer attachments pretty much every holiday for about 6 years, and it's working pretty well because I think the lady who enters product registration card information for them is probably able to enter my data from memory. (Granted, I don't have the attachment that allows you to link your own sausage, but since Hode insists she wants to get into charcuterie and I do have a birthday coming up, it will probably happen.) But anyhow, the major appliances, not so much. We have an okay fridge which we bought solely because it was short enough to fit under a weird cabinet in our house. We have an okay electric stove that came with the house. We have no dishwasher other than the sad, shriveled stumps at the end of my arms. (Go ahead and process that for a minute, ye fellow members of the sippy cup fan club. Shit.) And then there was our washer and dryer.

Okay, so we bought the washer and dryer from my parents several years ago when they went to a stackable set. They had had the set for several years themselves. Run-of-the-mill top loading washer with 3 water temperature settings - worked fine and I conned some dude out of $75 for it today after Big K and I wheeled the thing out into the front yard on Phook's wagon with hand-penned signage that included the elegant phrase "inquire within." (We thought that was hilarious.) But the dryer. Oh shit, the dryer. The dryer started going to hell 45 minutes after we hooked it up. We already once paid way too much money to have the motor replaced, and for the 2 years since then, excepting the first 2 weeks after the repairman left, it's taken an hour and a half to dry a load of clothes. And that's a good day - she's a temperamental old broad. I don't remember when the moisture sensor thing in it even worked...only the time dry has been operational for a good long time. And then a few months ago it started shrieking when I started it up. My dad came over and diagnosed it with something I've since blacked out, I paid a little money for a part he replaced for me, and then it was back to its standard lackadaisical--albeit quiet--performance. When it started screeching again a couple weeks ago, I got out a baseball bat and went all Office Space on that thing. (PC LOAD LETTER.) No, I didn't really do that. I just kept adding another hour onto that load of towels in the hopes that they'd dry before they developed black mold.

But then Big K came home, and I got out a hacksaw and started to dismember myself in front of him, and I said, "Every minute you delay in authorizing me to drop an obscene amount of money on new laundry appliances, I get a little closer to not being able to wash the mountain of dishes you create every day." And he said, "Go ahead, honey." Or something like that. It was actually a more peaceful transaction than that but I'm sure it included some unnecessary threats on my part, since that's how I roll. If I can invoke a reference to a sharp object and my eye, it's going to happen. But, yeah.

So I went online and read a shitload of reviews and found a vendor offering 18 months no interest financing and I pulled the trigger and spent roughly the equivalent of the national deficit on a new washer and dryer. Because you know I was getting a high efficiency washer while I was at it. Just like that. I bought a hundred trillion dollars worth of laundering technology while sitting in the very chair I'm blogging at you from right now. How modern of me. (My mother was horrified.)

I'm tempted to launch into a very long-winded justification of this purchase right now. For some reason I feel like I'm financially accountable to the internet, but upon further reflection, that's kind of dumb. We're gonna save an assload by not running a dryer around the clock and not dumping an entire lake into the laundry tub 14 times per day. We can afford the payment. And that's good enough for me, so it'd better be good enough for you. And really, I have a huge appliance boner (did I mention that?), so money was no object.

I'm gonna tell you what I got, dudes. The Electrolux. Dudes. Dudes. Dudes. I mean, the name sounds kinda fancy so it's gotta be, right? I mean, Kelly Ripa zooming around looking distressingly fit while hawking the shit on tv...I couldn't go wrong. In all seriousness, I have never read such glowing product reviews as this stuff got. It was all e-tears and gushing love poems and just utter blathering nonsense. So I was into it. Now, I didn't get the tippity top of the line and I didn't get the pedestals to raise them up to a more convenient height (only because we were about an inch shy of enough height because of a shelf) and I didn't spring for the kelly green (only because it wouldn't match my current kitchen/laundry area or my half-baked plans for my future dream kitchen/laundry). But still. This shit is F-A-N-C-Y.

And let me tell you, I deal with lot of human leakage. You know, your standard daily leakage. Someone is sick leakage. And "let's go to the hospital" leakage. Pretty much everyone that lives here poops on themselves on occasion. Really, I need the fancy. But dudes, I also wanted the fancy. And now the fancy is in my ghetto unfabulous laundry room. Here, the Pig will show you:

Dude, the stuff chimes to life at the touch of a button and a little screen says "Welcome" to me. That's the most sophisticated message I receive all day sometimes. There are all sorts of laundering options available to deal with my family's leaked-upon clothing. There's even a "sanitize" option that like boils the shit or something when somebody gets into some tainted potato salad and spends a couple days wrecking gastrointestinal shop. I can customize this and personalize that and pause the cycle and add garments and lock the controls so little naughty people can't go accidentally launching my spaceship. It squirts like a teaspoon of water on the clothes and then spins them until they're practically as dry as my pathetic dishpan hands and then it kindly notifies me that the magic has happened with a friendly little chime that takes the sting right out of the fact that I am doing a chore. And there are little greenie options within the greenmobile such as the ability to lower the water temp a couple degrees for each cycle or add an extra spin to reduce drying time and a lot of other ways to help me do penance for the fact that my former dryer is the reason behind every single sunburn that the human race has suffered for the past 5 years. And then the dryer has magical tools and is also really nice to me and--get this--includes a stationary drying rack. So what I am telling you is that rather than setting a sweater out on a towel for my ill-mannered cats to bathe themselves upon for 3 days (decidedly undoing the fact that I laundered the stupid thing in the first place), I will be setting my sweater on a rack in my spaceship and gingerly removing it shortly thereafter, only to find it dry, intact, and unsullied. Dude.

I don't know. Maybe you people have demanding jobs that pay you money. Or lives. Or interests other than the removal of spit-up stains. That being the case, you're reading this post and finding that you now have definitive proof that aliens have invaded and are living amongst humans on Earth. (Perhaps those spaceship references aren't just my clever wit.) But at this juncture, friends, I have to tell you that the unending hell of being a laundress is just a hugeass part of my life, my day, my labor. I do so much laundry and I do not like it. So now that the Electrolux has landed, I feel like a social worker who hates paperwork and just got a secretary. (Oddly, that scenario also recently played out in the K House.) I guess what I'm saying is that this is a big deal and I'm really excited. The night they arrived, I sat on the floor in front of the washer and just allowed myself to enter a pleasing trance as I watched that laundry spin. I received total consciousness of the homemaker variety. This is the stuff dreams are made of.

Can you people even imagine how I would react if I ever got a dishwasher?