The Eagle Has Landed!

Hello, all. The Professor, here. I'm guest blogging today.

We have made another little commitment to traveling with a lighter footprint ‘round these parts. It’s an investment in using less energy about the house and it will save us a bit of money each laundry day. We purchased an Eagle Clothes Drying Rack for air drying our clothes in the apartment.

Industrial size and strength. Hard metal frame with coated line adding up to 65 feet of drying space. Folds up nicely for storage, but opens into the general shape of a medium-sized flying wing aircraft you might see flying sorties over no man’s land. However, no stealth bomber, this… Once its wings are unfurled and it’s loaded with 30-40 pounds of the recently sopping, you can’t miss the darn thing!

It cost $52.90 including the delivery of the massive thing. That’s a pretty fair bargain given its MSRP of 59.95 without any shipping. (We declined the under carriage rust-coating package and the 10 year drivetrain warrantee.)

Our building has a laundry room in the basement. (Mother Necessity has her own homemade laundry detergent recipe that she’s told you all about in a previous post.) The prices for washing and drying the clothes went up a bit recently, including a bump in the price of the ultra mega-mega dryers to $1.75 per load. (Note my liberal use of parentheses, Mother Necessity?)

Yes, we partially did it to be cheap. Mother Necessity prefers the term frugal, with its connotations of personal virtue, simplicity of living, and noble intentions totally absent of meanness. But let’s call it as it is: we’re trying to squeeze the old nickel until it screams “uncle.” Mother Necessity is the mistress of the household books. We’ve worked hard to budget our money to go as far as it can. OK, she’s worked hard and I’ve quietly supported her from a respectful distance. But ultimately we’ve tried to answer the question of how to make ends meet in a rather unique way in this affluent enclave. Instead of driving hard to make more, we’ve tried to use less.

The Eagle has flown twice since it arrived, letting us skip the equivalent of three of those coal-fired, wallet-sapping, $1.75 each dryer loads. That’s $5.25 saved so far and the Eagle is already about 10% paid off. We’re not just saving a few dollars and cents; we’re avoiding regularly running a heavy machine that gobbles electricity to make heavy wet clothes spin for 30 minutes in excessive heat. Here in Chez Necessity, green living = black ink.