For the last several weeks, while we wait to close on the house, we’ve been snuggled up in an extend stay hotel. While this sounds super romantic and before you picture us like Eloise or even, $deity forbid, Suite Life of Zack and Cody, hotel living is not as gorgeous as one may expect or sounds. For example, we have a kitchenette which gives us a full-sized fridge and dishwasher, but no oven and a two burner flat top stove. The only dishware and cutlery we have is a two piece setting with a few extra plates. One pot. One food strainer. The sink is not large enough to do hand washing so we tend to run the dishwasher half-empty. And of course, the one cabinet in entire place holds all the dishware and the one pot. There is no room to house food or added cookery items, even though there is no cabinetry above the kitchen/stove/dishwasher area. Incredibly poor planning.
We were planning on bringing with us our non-perishable foodstuffs and cookery but there is no storage in the kitchen, or really anywhere in the suite. Those items are now in storage! A single, 10 hanger wide armoire and two medium 3-drawer dressers for our clothes and personal effects. Even for two people who donated bags and bags of stuff to Salvation Army before the move and only took enough to last a few weeks, it’s a little beyond tight. There is no additional storage space for personal items, bathing items or even shoes anywhere else in the suite.
I’m still seething with another example of why hotel living sucks with an example from tonight when I had a laundry war going on with Anonymous. This extend stay hotel is frequented by pilots, flight attendants and traveling business people and to make it more attractive, they have laundry facilities on every floor which is awesome. What is NOT so awesome is incidents like tonight when someone in the mistaken guise of being kind, pulled our laundry out of the washer and threw it all in the dryer and turned the dryer on high heat AND took over the washer, when I had a bag dirty laundry still sitting on top of the washer.
Now, I’m irritated as with living in a complex for the last several years, I\’ve gotten in the habit of setting timers to move laundry from washer->dryer (wash is 30 minutes, dryers are 1 hour) every time we did laundry so not to trap all the machines. Since hotel used same washer/dryer brand as the complex, I set my timer on my iPhone for 30 minutes appropriately only to find that at 33 minutes after I had thrown the laundry into the wash, someone had thrown the laundry into the dryer. The irritant comes in because half the load were items that were NOT TO BE TUMBLED DRIED.
I yank open the dryer door, pull out all the not-to-be dried stuff, throw in my fabric sheet and continue with the drying. Once I get back to our hotel room, I set my timer for 45 minutes to see if I can finish the rest of our laundry since Anonymous has taken over the washer. At 40 minutes, I waltz down to the laundry area to discover that someone had pulled our laundry out of the dryer and thrown it on top of the dryer, put their stuff from washer into the dryer and filled up the washer with another load. The load in the dryer was in there for some unspecified time as the dryer was stopped but the clothes were hot to the touch. They probably assumed since our (now few) items left in the dryer were already dry, so what was the big problem with taking a few extra minutes from our load?
I stomp back to our suite, wanting to wage war against the assholes who fuck with my laundry while Justin is rolling his eyes at my melodrama and my angry fist shaking. Reporting it to the management is fine, I GUESS, but it doesn’t really solve the issue because I have NO idea who it was, so I didn’t go running to management with my tales of woe. I was thinking of pulling some bullshit passive aggressive move (such as pulling their laundry from the washer, putting it on top of the washer and letting the washer continue on) but decided that I couldn’t be that much of a dick. 2011 is should not begin with war waging over stupid laundry, but hey, I have a theory that the more shitty NYE/NY day is, the better my year.
Thus, here is why hotel living is not the bee’s knees and why I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here.
So I didn’t plan on turning this entry into some sort of rage against laundry anonymous because this entry was to be more of a short, hey these are my resolutions for the year, as inspired by Kate, and instead I paint a picture of me skulking about hotel hallways waiting to pounce unsuspectingly on Laundry Anonymous. I think of myself more of a “I’ll get you my pretty!” kind of person. With that, my resolutions and continuances will come tomorrow.
x0x0x,
Lisa
1. Drats. The realtor pulled all the interior images of the home and no, we did not buy the house at $115K.2
2. Then I got sucked into updating walkscore.om with information about our new neighborhood that was missing, which in fact raised our walk score. Woo!