Valya’s Blog

“This is the 21st Century and we can’t afford to just waste energy willy-nilly,” said a woman interviewed for a story on NPR I listened to this evening on my way home from work. It was strange to me that the whole story revolved around the controversy at a condo complex somewhere over allowing or banning home owners to put up lining and use it to dry their laundry. I know that line-drying has been part of this country’s past, but it seems like such an ancient, distant way to do things. Yet, up until I moved here – and probably still to this day – we’ve always only used drylines to hang up our laundry on the balconies of the apartment blocks, not must in the yards of the houses.

One of the arguments from a homeowners’ association representative (or perhaps it was the city government) was that allowing residents to line their laundry dry would make for an unsightly condo complex and ultimately the rule was put in place simply to preserve the owners’ investment in their property. A laughable argument, I know. But it also made me think of Bulgarian apartment buildings where the owners (we call them apartments but they aren’t for rent, rather for ownership) created customized window panel and closed off their balconies almost as soon as the structure went up. It did indeed account for a patchwork of odd-looking buildings where no two apartments looked alike from the outside. Odd-looking ficus plants or old TVs and antique wooden cabinets, sometimes portable stoves, or even big plastic barrels full of sour lettuce or wine, somehow found their way in plain view, behind the customized patterned-glass banisters.

Without validating the silly reason the interviewee gave for the rule banning laundry dry lines in this complex, I have to wonder at the strangeness of the energy efficiency movement of modern day. Are we really considering bringing back air-drying laundry lines, stringing them from our condos, since we increasingly live in those instead of suburban houses, when the developing world (Bulgaria is the example in mind here, however limited that may be) is still in awe of our electric energy-guzzling laundry dryer. And yes, it is a symbol of status in Bulgaria, if you have a laundry dryer in your villa home outside the city limits (which is also a new development in the country, ala metropolis suburbia). How funny that the rest of the world – in many ways – is striving toward the “modern amenities” U.S. Americans have been living with for decades, while those same spoiled U.S. Americans are increasingly discussing a return to a more basic and modest lifestyle in the name of slowing global warming (buying local produce to avert gasoline expenditure for trucking California-grown veggies and fruit to your home in Seattle… ).

Speaking of unusual/far from mind ways to impact the fight on global warming, visit http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/. It will take just a few minutes (less than 5) to pledge your support and then you can change your PCs settings to ENERGY STAR compliance – so your monitor will shut off after x minutes of inactivity, your hard drive will power down after y minutes of idleness, etc.