Current mood:	Laundry stress
Current music:	Some spanish stuff the person two offices down is playing

A hand-washed laundry day.
Argh.

There's a lot that Bulgaria has going for it. The Washington Post thinks Sofia is the new Prague (though it's not full of snobby Czechs, so I'm not sure I quite get that one). The food is good. The weather very nice. People are fairly friendly. They send people off to die in Iraq to show what Good Friends they are to the US. And so forth.

But laundry, aye, there's the rub. And I do mean that literally. When I took an apartment with no freakin' washing machine, I figured, "Eh, how bad can it be."

Now, before you start saying, "Aw, crap, you baby, whassumatter, gotta take the laundry to the laundromat," let me note that there *is* no laundromat.

Oh, yeah. Hand-washing.

While a perfectly understandable practice for the 15th century or so, I must admit it palls more than a bit in the 21st. And how. After some one and a half hours of sweaty, wet labor, I managed to clean approximately a dozen pairs of socks and underwear; whereapon, putting them outside to dry, they promptly froze. I'm debating whether or not it would be more efficient to let them stay outside, or try and bake them over my radiators.

Good gad.

HRB index: 80 (+5 laundry, +3 discovering library has no goddamn copy of Wachtel's most recent book, the silly shits)
Current Book:Istvan Deak, Beyond Nationalism