The Crucial Inaugural Entry

This one had better be good, I suppose. I have to grab interest with funny or compelling anecdotes, but I want to avoid giving an exaggerated or one-sided or, on the other hand, overly-boring account of my life in Germany. Of course, I also want to impress you with my fabulous writing skills and irrepressible wit. But I don't want you to think I'm an ass. Also, it's important that I don't set the bar too high in the first few posts, or I'll spend the next 7 months avoiding this website like I've been avoiding AIM for the past couple years. Not that that's about a bar set too high--I'm just too lazy to chat online anymore.

To jump right in, I just came down from the attic, where I was taking laundry off the line. The day after I arrived, about a week and a half ago, we decided Bill's laundry pile was too big to ignore and took it downstairs to Herr and Frau Lehm(pronounced "lame")'s laundry room. A couple hours later, with a load in the washer and another in the dryer, our doorbell buzzed. We opened the door to find the Lehms peering up the stairs, Herr L. wiggling his fingers for us to come down. Bill translated for me as Herr L. waved his hands at the washer and dryer and Frau L. pulled our still-wet laundry out of the dryer. "He says we can't use both machines at the same time...And he says that it's too expensive to use the dryer... That it's bad to use it... That we need to hang our laundry in the attic to dry." So Bill and I climbed up to the (very cold, rather damp) attic and I showed him how to hang stuff on the clotheslines that were strung under the roof beams. He broke several clothespins in the process. Most of the laundry takes two days to dry. Jeans are more like three. We get the last bit of dampness out by draping them over the lamp.

For the most part, we try to follow the Lehm's rules closely, as the apartment is nice and the rent is low and, frankly, there's nowhere else to go if they decide they don't like us. So we keep the bathroom windows open even though the temperature high is around 40 and the low is cold enough that I don't want to know. And we separate our paper waste (dirty kleenex, mostly), our "packaging" waste (gouda singles wrappers, wine corks, the knife Bill broke), and our food waste (coffee grounds, crumbs from onion crackers, the fat Bill pulls off of his sandwich ham), giving Herr L. the paper to burn in the furnace to heat the house, putting the "packaging" in the outside garbage, and emptying the moldy food remains into the disgusting compost pile at the back of the yard [more on the smells of Zwonitz later]. We vacuum at least once a week, do dishes several times a day, and generally keep the apartment spotless, an impressive feat for both of us (but special congratulations are owed to Bill if you saw either Mod 27A or his "apartment" in Philly this summer).

But of all the efforts we make to abide by the Lehm's rules for living in the apartment above their house, the laundry is the most annoying. It's cold here. I want to pull on a sweatshirt warm and fuzzy from the dryer, not a pair of jeans with back pockets damp on my bum and a waistband that chafes my hips. So when the Lehms took a drive to the Czech Republic yesterday to do some shopping (stuff's cheaper there, apparently), and we happened to be doing a load of laundry, when it came time to pull our wet clothes from the washer we decided to break the rules a little and put them in the dryer. We make great efforts to keep the energy bill low. We keep lights off and the heat turned down and I turn off the shower when I shave my legs (which is freezing, as the windows must meanwhile stay open for ventilation) and Bill showed me how to squeegee the shower doors because the Lehm's don't like water marks on the glass. So we figured we could indulge ourselves this once with dryer-warmed clothes. But the Lehms came home earlier than expected.

I heard them in the driveway. Bill and I stared at each other. They were at the bottom of the stairs, right next to the laundry room and the rumbling dryer. What should we do? How do we explain it? We decided to tell them we were afraid the clothes wouldn't be dry before we left for Amsterdam Friday morning, so we stuck them in the dryer for a few minutes but were planning to move them to the attic clothesline. We came downstairs, me trying not to look sheepish, trying not to blush, and Bill explained while I pulled armfuls of steaming clothes from the dryer, smiled at the Lehms, and squeezed past them up the stairs. Bill picked up the socks I dropped and followed me into the frigid attic.

I have some work to do to redeem myself as the girlfriend who exerts a good, house-cleaning and energy-efficient influence on the Lehm's original, once-messy American tenant. And I have to do it with barely a word of German. So now I'm going to go read more of my "The EVERYTHING Learning German Book".

And yes, we will be careful and safe in Amsterdam this weekend.