Tag: laundry

Posted on
by

I went into the bank for quarters the other day, and they’re back to rationing them, only exchanging one roll at a time. Meanwhile, the landlord is finally looking at switching the laundry room to a card system.

A coin shortage seems oddly specific, and the first time I encountered the limit back in… June? July? (I have no idea how much time passes anymore unless I write something down.) I wondered if people were deliberately hoarding coins. Or maybe just quarters. I mean, yeah, I was trying to pick up two to four rolls at a time to reduce the number of physical trips to the bank (planning around reduced hours, and being around *gasp* people!), but I was using them!

Then I saw an article pointing out that it’s simpler than that: people just aren’t out spending cash much — stores have been closed, people aren’t able to work, there have been various levels of stay-at-home orders — so coins aren’t circulating and aren’t making it back to banks. Some fast food places have been doing things like offering a free bag of chips or a free soda instead of change when people pay cash — because it’s easier to restock chips and soda than coins.

I can’t find the specific article I read at the time, but there have been a whole bunch of others since June. Amusingly, I found Forbes back in July saying, Well, actually, it’s not really a coin shortage, it’s a circulation disruption. And yeah, at a high level, you need different strategies to resolve an actual shortage of something vs. a distribution issue. But down at the “I need clean clothes” level it doesn’t make a lot of difference.

Speaking of clothes, I assume the laundry machine service charges more to rent the debit card systems than the quarter boxes. Every big apartment complex I’ve lived in used one, but the small building I live in now has been quarter-based since we moved in. But with the prices climbing, and especially with the ongoing pandemic, I’d much rather recharge a debit card at home than physically walk into the bank every week.

Posted on
by

A few lessons we learned the hard way on our recent trip to Chicago for Worldcon/Chicon 7.

#1: Don’t count on laundry being easy. The hotel we stayed at didn’t have a laundry room, but they did have a laundry service…for $8 a shirt. Fine for the business traveler who needs one outfit cleaned, but a family of three could spend hundreds of dollars on a single load. No problem, you might think: find a laundromat. No such luck: As near as we could find, there are no laundromats in downtown Chicago. I ended up spending $12 each way for a taxi out to the suburbs so we could have clean clothes for the second half of the trip. The most expensive load of laundry I’ve ever done, but an order of magnitude cheaper than the hotel laundry service.

What do people who live in Chicago do if their washing machine breaks down? Or do the high-rise buildings have extra laundry rooms for residents?

#2: Having your toddler’s own car seat on the airplane is great. Lugging it around the airport, hotel, shuttles and taxis? Not so much. J slept through the first ⅔ of the flight out and the first ⅓ of the flight back. Despite the unfamiliar circumstances of the plane, he was in a familiar, comfortable seat, and I’d recommend it for any parent who can afford to buy their toddler his/her own seat. But it’s still a pain to drag it around. Update: We’ve since picked up a tiny folding luggage cart. We can roll the seat all around the airport, then fold up the cart and put it in a carry-on bag. I think it cost about $15-20.

#3: Remember to factor in parking when evaluating the cost of car rental. Since we were bringing the child car seat anyway, we figured we’d rent a car and just snap it in. It worked well enough, but when we got to the hotel we were faced with a $52/night parking charge. Over 9 days, that added up to more than the cost of renting the car! And the first place we drove to, Lincoln Park Zoo, cost $30 for parking – more than cab fare would have been.

It became clear that most of what we wanted to do was going to be within walking distance, and it would be cheaper to return the car early and take taxis to the places farther out. That’s exactly what we did.

#4: How much Internet access do you really need? Our hotel had a nice setup: A) $12.95 for 24 hours for up to three devices for in-room wi-fi. B) Free wi-fi in the lobby. C) Convention areas were paid for by the con. Over 9 days we pulled out the laptop maybe three or four times, and we used the tablet every day.

The thing is, my heaviest online use of the tablet was in the convention, not in the room. In the room, I was mostly checking email/social networks or playing offline games, or one of us was reading (either to ourselves or to J). These are low-bandwidth activities where high latency isn’t a problem, and it would have been fine to fire up the phone’s mobile hotspot for a few minutes or even read email offline & let it sync the next time I was in the lobby. (I caught up on email on the airplane on the way back, then let the changes & replies sync up after when we landed.)

Obviously this will depend on how connected you want or need to be, and what other devices you have. In our case, we paid for 7 or 8 days of internet and probably only needed 3 or 4.

Posted on
by

image

So, we didn’t make it to WonderCon today. We got out later than planned, and ended up hitting rush hour traffic in San Jose, which cleared up after a while, but dropped back to parking lot status as we approached Downtown San Francisco. By then it was raining pretty steadily as well.

Then I made the mistake of relying on Google Maps for directions to the hotel. One way streets, poorly labeled streets, streets where cars have to share with cable cars, trolleys and pedestrians… We missed our turn at one point & had to go around a few blocks to get back on track, then got stuck on Market Street where we could only move one carlength at a time.

Somewhere in all this, I drove over a bump. I didn’t think anything of it, since the car wasn’t moving fast enough to notice any change in how it handled. The low tire pressure light came on, but I see that in cold weather sometimes. It was only after we’d reached the hotel (on the left side of a one-way street) — and been handed a flyer with directions to the parking entrance — that someone in another car told us that the front right tire was flat.

Continue reading →

Posted on
by

Collapsible laundry basket, clearly labeled.

Yes, that really is laundry in there, folks! See how important labels are!

(Speaking of which, I would have posted this earlier, but I just spent 35 ^%$!@ minutes waiting for someone to show up and empty out one of the eight driers that were finished. And they’re double-stacked, so you can’t just pull the clothes out and set them on top. Grrr…)

»All pages site-wide with this tag