After a full day at the University of Michigan, with another half-day ahead tomorrow, I am exhausted and have much to report, but at the moment can only summon this one example of wonder, which I offer you now:
The dorm laundry facilities can be monitored online, and will indicate how many machines are free, as well as how much time remains on those that are in use.
Signs and wonders.
Carry on.
Dexter said on June 10, 2015 at 1:00 am
If the two Jeffs, Brian Stouder, MichaelG and I teamed with LeBron James we could and would win the NBA Finals. King James is just so amazing. Not only the best player in ages, he also directs traffic on the floor and coaches and yells at the other guys to get in line. Last night’s performance was just superb.
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Hattie said on June 10, 2015 at 2:05 am
Times may have changed, but you still have to do the damned wash.
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Linda said on June 10, 2015 at 5:50 am
I would have killed for those monitors in my first apartment building, when washing meant coming down from the eighth floor. Being able to wash and dry anytime, even in your skivvies, is the greatest luxury of having machines in your home or unit.
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adrianne said on June 10, 2015 at 6:01 am
I am enjoying LeBron James’ performance in the playoffs – the guy is carrying the entire team on his big shoulders without Love and Irving. Go Cavs!
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David C. said on June 10, 2015 at 6:15 am
Now all they need is an app to tell them to separate whites and colors.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on June 10, 2015 at 6:53 am
Dexter, my dribbling skills are abysmal. I’m only good for defensive work in the paint. You’re asking an awful lot of James to use me….
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alex said on June 10, 2015 at 7:18 am
In my old 750-unit hi-rise condo building, you couldn’t have laundering equipment in your own unit but had to share a common laundry room, which was always a hit-or-miss proposition. Signs were posted that said unattended laundry could be removed from machines. Often it was — right in the middle of a cycle. And of course there were the cranks who would go ballistic on you if you touched their stuff despite the clearly posted rules.
And then there was someone who for a time was stealing my undies. Perhaps others’ as well. Doing what with them God only knows. And one day a friend busted a little old lady stealing my bath towels when I left the room.
I would be very surprised if they didn’t have such a monitoring system in place now, just as they added surveillance in all of the elevators and corridors when I was still there, and petty vandalism all but disappeared. Those who didn’t get the message, and there were some, got shamed, like the guy who was tossing patio furniture off of the 28th floor roof deck.
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Nancy P said on June 10, 2015 at 7:52 am
Why is orientation at the beginning of the summer instead of the end?
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Connie said on June 10, 2015 at 7:58 am
I’m guessing they don’t need quarters for the washers. Cards or ?
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Connie said on June 10, 2015 at 8:38 am
So that Walmart fight video? Police called to Beech Grove Wal-Mart nearly 500 times this year
http://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/police-called-to-beech-grove-wal-mart-nearly-500-times-this-year
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Dorothy said on June 10, 2015 at 8:47 am
Because at the end of summer they’re gearing up on campus for the arrival of the students, that’s why. Also allows parents/prospective students to get that trip over and done with so they can proceed with summer jobs and/or travel.
On the news this morning I saw a story about a new laundry service that is coming here to UD. They are lockers with huge blue bags in them. This company WILL DO THE LAUNDRY FOR YOU. They give you a four digit code for the locker so you and only you can pick up the laundry. I can’t begin to guess what that’s going to cost a student, but hey, if they can afford the tuition here, they can afford the laundry service, right? And speaking of laundry and colleges, when I worked at Kenyon I heard more than once about when Paul Newman was a student there and how he started a laundry service on campus to make some extra dough. I guess he was glad he didn’t need to stay with that profession.
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Nancy P said on June 10, 2015 at 8:51 am
When I started college–back in the 1800s–freshmen just showed up a week early for orientation. I guess that’s what I was thinking of. Parents weren’t included.
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Connie said on June 10, 2015 at 9:15 am
I drove alone to East Lansing for a mid summer two day orientation. Parents not invited. At the time it was the longest distance – 90 miles! – I had ever driven alone, to a place I had never been, with weird directions. Got there, did it, went home.
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Connie said on June 10, 2015 at 9:16 am
Oh, and when my father was in grad school at Michigan he mailed his laundry home, there were special boxes for mailing back freshly ironed shirts.
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BethB said on June 10, 2015 at 9:23 am
When I started college in 1968, I guess we had orientation, I just don’t remember much about it. I DO remember that they had what they called The Freshman Hike which was a get-acquainted activity, sort of. We lined up one evening in two lines, and we walked around campus that way, switching to the next person when directed by the leader. It was a quick way to meet a lot of people. I was absolutely boy crazy then, in a completely virginal way, and I looked at each new guy I met as a potential life-long mate. Not really a suitable test for a minute-long conversation which usually only consisted of finding out name, home town, major, class schedule, etc.
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Jolene said on June 10, 2015 at 9:28 am
The early visits likely help students plan exactly what they’ll need and have room for. Having spent years living in apartments with either no or faraway laundries, the idea of being able to monitor the machines online sounds heavenly to me.
I still live in an apartment, but, when I was looking, my make-or-break criterion was a full-size washer and dryer in the unit. Such a step up in quality of life.
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BethB said on June 10, 2015 at 9:34 am
Connie, my dad did that, too, back in the mid 1930s when he was in college, a hundred miles from home.
Later, in the 1940s, when my parents were at Duke, they were mailed EGGS from Grandpa’s Hilligas’s farm in Ohio! When we cleaned out my parents’ home after they moved to assisted living, we found the mailing crate in the rafters of the basement. It was a special metal container that still had the racks inside for several dozen eggs.
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Hank Stuever said on June 10, 2015 at 9:41 am
Laundry’s been hacked. Like riding in a plain old smelly taxi or returning a phone call, you can add it to the list of things that the future generation just does not want to do: http://nymag.com/news/features/laundry-apps-2014-5/
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Deborah said on June 10, 2015 at 9:48 am
In Santa Fe we have a washer and dryer in the unit. In Chicago we have to go down to the Laundry room on the first floor. It’s always freezing in there in the winter because, thanks to Mies, it’s surrounded by glass, frosted glass so no one can see in.
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Suzanne said on June 10, 2015 at 10:27 am
My college orientation consisted of a couple of hours in a stuffy room and that was it. I don’t even remember if parents were invited or if they were there. First generation college, that’s me! My parents couldn’t wait to get the heck outta town after they dropped me off. Between minimal parental support (how it was back then) and the registration process (long lines, excessive August heat/humidity, wandering from station to station along with about a million other hot, sweaty, stressed freshmen, picking up a card for each class) I am amazed that I made it through. My kids’ experience was completely different with a 2 day registration affair, parent meetings, food, and a skit about avoiding sexual assault.
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Suzanne said on June 10, 2015 at 10:29 am
And now they have swipe cards for laundry & making copies. You just add funds to the card as needed!
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alex said on June 10, 2015 at 10:30 am
Clever Mies. I had no idea that’s what was there or why the glass was frosted. In our building the laundry was on the top floor, along with storage lockers. The ceiling was lined with fat, sausage-like pipes swathed in some sort of tape that became brittle with time (or possibly the coats of paint that had been slapped over it) and they would develop little ruptures that would leak powdered asbestos. Reminded me of Laraine Newman on the SNL skit where she and Chevy were going through customs at an airport and she was trying to be nonchalant while cocaine poured out from her boobs.
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Deborah said on June 10, 2015 at 11:31 am
Alex, your comment had me laughing out loud. On the first floor of our building there is a mailroom, laundry room and a little store that is snobbishly called the “commissary”. It’s all pretty junky stuff so the frosted glass hides it fairly successfully.
Little Bird came home yesterday and had stories galore about the wedding and the prep for it. She had a stylist do her hair and makeup, she said she’s never had so makeup on in her life. I texted her that she needed to change her name to Kardashian when she sent me a selfie after the stylist was through. The stylist spray painted facial structure on her. And she couldn’t get the false eyelashes off for days, after awhile she said they looked like dead centipedes on her face.
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brian stouder said on June 10, 2015 at 11:35 am
I’m braced for the BREAKING NEWS that will suddenly engulf us, when the SCOTUS decisions begin cascading – possibly as soon as today, and certainly before June ends.
Marriage equality for all Americans? Maybe.
Yet another chance for Fox News to prematurely ejaculate* the news that “ObamaCare” has been crippled? Possibly.
I guess the merry-go-round will keep on spinnin’, regardless whether we worry or not.
http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/06/wednesday-round-up-275/
Still, it’s worrisome.
And let me just say, the book I’m now waist-deep into (To Make Men Free, which is a history of the Republican party) is by turns fascinating, puzzling, and generally annoying…so its good stuff, I guess
*In the “blurt” sense of the word, of course.
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brian stouder said on June 10, 2015 at 11:37 am
I think Deborah has the early lead for Thread-Win, with dead centipedes on the bride’s maids’ face!
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adrianne said on June 10, 2015 at 11:46 am
Hey Brian: Now that my new job entails encyclopedic perusal of SCOTUS (and I love the SCOTUS blog!) I can share what we’re expecting this month:
The court has 20 more opinions in argued cases to release. Expectation is starting next week (they do orders and opinions every Monday), they’ll start doubling up on releases, most likely on Thursdays.
Expectation is that Obergefell (same-sex marriage) and King v. Burwell (Obamacare) will be released on the very last day of the session (now slated for Monday, June 29, but it could go into Tuesday, June 30). We’re prepping with numerous prewrites for both of those babies.
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brian stouder said on June 10, 2015 at 11:49 am
Are there any tea-leaf readers’ inside tips worth paying attention to?
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Heather said on June 10, 2015 at 11:51 am
When I was in NY I stayed with my friends in the East Village, a couple who are both freelance (she writer/editor, he illustrator) and successful–that is, they would be really well-off if they lived anywhere else but in NYC. Anyway I was kinda jealous of their lifestyle, until I realized they didn’t have washer-dryers and they had to trek up and down six flights of stairs to the basement for loads. Suddenly I was not quite so jealous. But they are both pretty thin, so there’s that.
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Jolene said on June 10, 2015 at 12:11 pm
I already have a knot in my stomach about King v. Burwell. I really can’t imagine what will happen if the ACA is undone.
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adrianne said on June 10, 2015 at 12:51 pm
Brian, as they say in Hollywood, nobody knows nothing! It does seem likely that the court will find a right to marriage. Only debate is if it will be 5-4, with Kennedy writing the opinion, or 6-3, with Roberts joining in on the side of history. King v. Burwell is really opaque, judging from the questions (or the lacks thereof) during oral arguments. I think Roberts won’t want to be the one responsible for tearing apart the signature achievement of the Obama administration, and he’ll kick it out. It’s really a crap case. The four other conservative justices – Kennedy, Scalia, Alito and Thomas – don’t care about the effect on the country.
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coozledad said on June 10, 2015 at 12:53 pm
A grown man drops eighty grand on a speedboat while he’s shit deep in debt. For his next act, he wants to be C+ Augustus II.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/us/politics/marco-rubio-finances-debt-loans-credit.html?_r=0
None of them know jack shit about money, and why would they? It’s always just been given to them.
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Linda said on June 10, 2015 at 1:35 pm
Cooz, that’s not even the most gobsmacking thing in the news. It’s that Louisiana legislators, like medieval supplicants standing in the snow, are asking a Washington fund channeler PERMISSION to not let their state go broke:
http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2015/06/grover_norquist_louisianas_une.html
I used to think that Repubs who chased money were whores, but women who rent out their vaginas for cash have more self-respect; they would have just asked their pimp to work him over.
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LAMary said on June 10, 2015 at 1:37 pm
My grand niece, Sara Sinning, is currently in Argentina at the World Inline Hockey championships. She is by all accounts a fearless, smart player and I am so proud of her. Her ultimate goal is playing ice hockey for the US Olympic team. Go Sara!
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brian stouder said on June 10, 2015 at 1:53 pm
Go Sara, indeed!!
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Peter said on June 10, 2015 at 2:25 pm
1. L A Mary – does Sara play defense? Is she under 40 years old? Can she skate without falling down a lot? If so, please forward her resume to Mr. Joel Quenneville, Coach, Chicago National League Hockey Club Inc. Thank you.
2. My son’s college has had the on-line laundry app for a couple of years now, and I think it’s one of the greatest advances that society has ever made. To him, it’s meh. The app will not only tell you when the stuff is ready to go in the dryer, but will send a text to let you know it’s last call for adding clothes to a particular cycle.
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coozledad said on June 10, 2015 at 2:31 pm
Linda: Republicanism has now entered the dream state. It’s untethered to reality. That’s why they’re always swinging at phantoms, and even shooting at them sometimes.
Apparently there’s some new film about sleep paralysis that’s supposed to be scary. I don’t know why, unless it’s about the giant plate of shit Reagan fed us and the Republicans insist we keep eating.
And here’s another instance of that sleepwalking. These people are just fucking gross:
http://defamer.gawker.com/the-queen-of-versailles-mourns-the-loss-of-18-year-old-1710342968
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Sherri said on June 10, 2015 at 2:51 pm
I want a laundry app for my washer and dryer. The washer and dryer each have an alert tone, but I can’t hear it from most areas of my house, and my husband and daughter both seem oblivious to it. If I had some way for the washer and dryer to send an alert to a smart phone, that would be great. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any after-market consumer solutions for this. There are instructions for making your own, using Arduino and accelerometers, or you can buy a new washer and dryer with wifi built in (Samsung and LG sell these, but I don’t know anything about the quality of the washer and dryers.) It’s not a big enough problem for me to want to spend the time to make my own, so maybe somebody will do a Kickstarter for an aftermarket consumer device.
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Dexter said on June 10, 2015 at 2:55 pm
Mom did my wash until I left the roost at age 18 and had to use coin laundries. The last move my parents made was into a house with basement washer-dryer hookups, and Mom told Dad to junk the old machines, and they became laundromat devotees. Mom especially actually enjoyed the social event of community shared washers and dryers, I do believe. She loved to talk to just about anybody; I can still hear her laughter as she swapped stories with other customers at the wash-o-rama.
I only remember two specific stories of the hum-drum chore of clothes washing: one was about how I was in Memphis on the ball team and needed to do a laundry and followed directions…I turned , on foot, onto Beale Street , 1968 this was, and that area was just about the worst run-down slum I had ever seen, and the atmosphere scared me as I was hiking with a laundry bag over my shoulder , probably the first white boy to venture down this far these folks had seen for years. Of course nobody paid me no never-mind, as the old saying goes, and I washed and dried my stuff alongside an entirely Black clientele, and walked the same way back to our seedy hotel. A decade or two later, the whole area became Beale Street re-born. You shoulda seen it back then.
And the other time was when I was doing laundry in a Fort Wayne laundromat out somewhere by Time Corners in Fort Wayne. I had a moment where I hated my life, hated my future, hated myself, and I swore that as soon as possible , if I ever got a real job and a paycheck again the first time possible I was going to have a goddam washer and dryer in my abode. A few years later I had a brand new Maytag set and I was one happy fellow.
Dad used to work out of The Gettle Building in FWA, and he’d drop his white shirts off at a place on Broadway that I seem to recall was Chen’s Chinese Laundry. In the army I remember a laundry service, but no particulars…but in Vietnam when we were on duty at the Quonset Hut Dispensary, we had mama-sans,
older ladies, who did our laundry by hand, daily. They did a helluva great job with the washing and pressing of our uniform fatigues.
The best cornball laundry story I remember concerned a fellow soldier named Ed H., from Boston, MA. This was during my year in Monterey. Ed was too lazy to send his laundry out, so he’d go to the PX, buy a pack of tighty-whities, wear a pair a MONTH, then chuck them against a wall in the barracks for someone to sweep up and trash. That mo-fo was an unforgettable charfacter, if just for how filthy he was.
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Deborah said on June 10, 2015 at 2:58 pm
Sherri, In Santa Fe our landlady bought us a new dryer that was installed a couple of weeks ago. We have the opposite problem with it, the damn buzzer is so loud it could wake the dead, and that’s on the quieter setting. We just turned the buzzer off, so we have to be conscious of the whirring of the dyer to know when it stops. I agree an app that would tell you when the drying cycle is done would be helpful.
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brian stouder said on June 10, 2015 at 2:58 pm
Cooz, there is an entire novel in that one photo, of the self-absorbed mother at her young daughter’s funeral. Made me exhale
Talk about casting a pall…
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Julie Robinson said on June 10, 2015 at 4:51 pm
Dexter, Chen’s was right next to our church and we used to own it, but the leachyed enough chemicals in to the building that cleanup would cost a small fortune. We turned the building over to the local historic preservationists, who could get grant money for the cleanup. It’s all done now, and waiting for a new owner. Anyone interested?
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Brandon said on June 10, 2015 at 9:40 pm
I’m not keen on the Internet of Things.
—–
Rubio is sure raising money off the Times articles, though.
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Basset said on June 10, 2015 at 10:36 pm
Suzanne@20, me too.
Nancy, what’s Kate going to major in, or has she decided yet?
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