Sorry, Roomba, I got a new best friend now...

About a year and a half ago, I finally bought myself a roomba and announced it to everyone who would hear me how the roomba was my new best friend. It was (and still is!) awesome: it goes around vacuuming the living room while I'm cleaning up the bedroom, vacuums my bedroom while I'm in the shower, etc, etc. It picks up so much cat hair it's quite disgusting. Really.

But vacuuming was never something I hated to do, the roomba just made it more convenient to get it done, and easier to get it done more frequently. I hate doing the dishes but thankfully the dishwasher works (when I lived in NJ and had no dishwasher, I actually used paper plates and plastic-ware at home. And I'm so not kidding...)

I own my place, but since it was pretty much the only place in Arlington I could afford, I had to give up some of the things I wanted in an apartment. One of them was a washer & dryer.

So I hate, hate, HATE doing my laundry. Having to share the laundry room downstairs and basically babysit my clothes ("hmmm, the machine will stop in 30 minutes, gotta be back downstairs in half an hour then"), and a few times being all psyched up to wash my clothes only to get there to find all the machines in use, is a hassle. So I let it accumulate. Like a lot. When I finally get it done, I do about 5 loads. And I still don't finish all of it. Man, I'm one of those people who buys more socks because there are no clean ones left at home -- and thankfully I'm not one to wear dirty clothes/socks just yet, so I can justify the expense of new socks. (Before you get grossed out, I handwash my underwear in the shower -- I guess it's a Brazilian thing to do that -- so I always have clean underwear).

Anyway... My parents found (and bought for me) this baby at BJ's Wholesale yesterday... Yep, a portable washer! That I hook up to my sink! That is big enough to fit pretty much everything, except probably sheets & blankets.

I tried it out yesterday and it's wonderful. Works & cleans just like a regular size washer. It's not even very noisy (so my neighbors don't have any idea I smuggled a washer into my place).

Yes, I still don't have a dryer, but I don't mind hanging my stuff since I always end up hang drying most of my clothes anyway (probably another Brazilian tradition -- dryers ruin clothes!). I can always hit the laundry room to use the dryer when I need to wear something TODAY or when I want to shrink something (or, of course, so I can dry my bedsheets... my drying rack is so not big enough).

The best part? Right now I'm typing this wearing only my underwear, while the roomba is vacuuming, and my new best friend is busy with its third load.

Ah yeah, and I can use my quarters for other important things, like the meters (by the way, how come no one is complaining about the increase in prices of the Arlington parking meters?? A month ago 25 cents would let me park for 20 minutes, now it's only 15 minutes -- that's a 25% difference!)