Air Conditioning and Laundry

Air Conditioning
This morning I thought, good lord, this is the first time in my life that I've lived in a house without air conditioning.  And it's miserable.  Except that's not true.  My house senior year of college didn't have air conditioning.  So this is actually my first summer without air conditioning.

Senior year I only lived in my house for a few weeks in August when the house would get unbearably hot.  Liz and I would wake up in the morning, clean as much of the house as we could (gross boys lived there before us. We spent literally two weeks cleaning out the grime).  Around noon or one we'd have reached our breaking point with the heat and leave to go get lunch.  In air conditioning.  And then go to the food store or target or home depot.  In air conditioning.  And we wouldn't come home until the sun had gone down enough that the house was bearable again.  And then we'd keep cleaning.

I'm not sure I can keep up that lifestyle all summer.  Today is only May 12th and it's a solid 90 degrees out.  I couldn't care that I'd get stared at, I went outside with soaking wet hair, and it was dry in under 30 minutes.  I was wearing the lightest dress I own and still had the damn thing stinking to me after 10 minutes of walking.  And it's only going to get worse.  I tried to accustom myself to the heat before I left, but there was only so much I could do.  When I got home from my walk all I wanted was a nice class of ice water, but due to my lack of a freezer, that's impossible.  And my housemates have taken up our tiny refrigerator, so I can't even keep a pitcher of water in there.

I realize that this is quite the first world problem, but I've never actually had to cope with this.  Well, now that I'm thinking about it, I actually went through 6 summers without air conditioning at Camp Lakota but we were in the mountains with breezes and a (gross) lake.  So maybe it's just been 7 years since I've had to cope with summer heat. But I'm not sure I'll ever get accustomed to sitting down and having every inch of your body be sticky.  But not sweaty.  It's just cool enough that my body is on the cusp of sweating without actually sweating which might be even more uncomfortable than if I sat hear in a sweaty heap.

Laundry
Today was my first forray into doing my own laundry in Spain.  Normally this wouldn't be a big deal.  Washer.  Dryer.  Fold.  Done.

It started with not really being sure how to use the washing machine.  My housemates are out of town, so I figured out out my self.  Set to cotton.  Check.  Go.  An hour later, my clothes were still being washed.  I was wondering what 90°, 60°, 40° meant next to different settings.  What could these degrees possibly mean.  Minutes.  They mean minutes.  Needless to say I fast-forwarded the wash to spin dry.

Then comes the drying process.  Almost no one in Madrid has a dryer.  Washers are really rough on clothes as it is (maybe because I normal wash cycle runs for 60 minutes, then spin dries), and dryers are even harsher on clothes.  So everyone has drying racks or clothes lines strung outside their apartments.  Now, the only time in my life I've hung clothes on a clothes line was with my grandmother.  But her clothes line is strung across the back patio and all you have to do is walk up to the line and pin it and you're done.  If the clothing falls, NBD, you pick it up and put it back on the line.

My clothes line is strung between my apartment and the apartment across the patio from me on a pulley so you can pull the clothes line away from you to hang more, or towards you to collect the clothes.  I live on the 4th floor.  And am 2 or 3 inches too short to comfortably reach the end of the line.  So I pinned one side of the shirt, pushed the line, pinned the second side.  And  prayed it didn't fall.  I tried not to hang clothing past the roof below me so at least if it falls I have a chance of recovering it without knocking on neighbors' doors to see if they have my clothing.  So far, so good.