The emails are flooding in...

...but I don't have a lot of time to respond because I'm suddenly swamped with work. Why don't we have a dryer here? Well, that's a long story but there is a two-pronged answer. For one thing, Italians don't trust appliances (see this reprint of a Wall Street Journal article here) to get the job done. Why machine dry your undies when you can see them flapping in the breeze before your eyes and then iron each individual pair with amore? And they don't look for conveniece but the "right way" (I am not kidding when I say the simple mop has not made any inroads here - they use a cloth and this big scrub brush thingie with a long handle) to do things around the house.

More importantly, an American clothes dryer uses between 4,000 and 6,000 watts and we are only allotted 3,000 watts total for energy use in our whole apartment. The government decides how much energy you can have and how many appliances you can use. It's not a free-for-all here. If you decide you want to open a machine shop in your basement, you have to petition town hall to get more energy (well after you jump through all of the bureaucratic hoops to open a business - good luck!). So, for instance, I currently can't dry my hair while the oven is on. Cristiano's parents almost fell over when they saw a real American washer (which compared to the petite Italian washer is downright industrial in look and feel; Italian washers are also slow and plodding as the "fast" cycle on mine takes 90 minutes!) and clothes dryer on their first trip to the U.S. Clothes dryers are energy hogs any way you look at it and EnergyStar won't even rate them because there is no making a dryer that much more efficient. We won't even talk what the energy costs would be to run a dryer over here (just for point of reference, gas costs over $9 a gallon...).

In recent years, I've begun to see small clothes dryers here, but the only people I know who've bought one are American expats and they tell me they suck. First of all, they work with some kind of lame condensation technology and don't get your clothes fully dry and wrinkle-free. And capacity is, like, two pairs of jeans. So days of waiting and cardboard clothes are my cross to bear. Oh the good old days when I had no idea how "evil" the clothes dryer was and I'd just throw in one pair of jeans and a sheet of Bounce. Lights were probably flickering in some Third-World village somewhere just so I could have perfect fitting Calvins, but I was none the wiser. OK, I'm just being a smartass now. I do wish I had a dryer. I'd just use it intelligently. I mean, the iron isn't exactly energy efficient either but irons here run about 1,000 watts, so I guess that's an improvement. Too bad I hate ironing. Back to talking about baby.

P.S. The sun came out today!