Tomorrow morning we will be driving our guests to the airport.  My wife Becky just told me that one of our guests, Cassandra, who has read this blog, asked her: "Does he always make fun of his roommates?" I think she was referring to the "Cellulite Pants" blog entry with Irene.  But I'd like to clear the air on that particular "expose."  A few weeks went by before I actually got around to blogging about that.  Irene kept asking me: "Did you blog about the cellulite pants yet?"  

Irene asks me to blog about things.  Most things she asks me to blog about, or tells me that I should blog about, don't end up in this blog.  She's sitting about five feet away from me right now, curious what I'm blogging about, and looking at a picture of a guy we know who's at least 6'6" standing next to a guy who's about 4'10" at most.  Dave just commented that the big guy is about six of the little guys.  How can people vary so much in size?

I guess that while I'm clearing the air, or telling you that I didn't blog about Irene behind her back, in fact it was at her behest.  I'm also, at the same time, making fun of her again.  The four of us have been sharing an apartment for almost four months now, most of it unblogged about.

A shame really, so many things have happened that have been blog-worthy, but it seems that when the blog-worthy things that happen, the less time I have to type them into a blog.

Many things happen here that are not fun for me to blog about.  For example today we went and visited "Russian Street" and saw the river half thawed.  It was exciting, and I'm not sure what else to say about it...  There was a weird tunnel under the road with a McDonald's in it right before the river.

Also today: we had six single girls over to visit with us and our guests.  Becky and Irene arranged it, they called it "The single girl party," the goal of the party was to counteract the pressure the girls have here from their families to get married.  I slept through the first half of it, in other words I was sleeping in our room and woke up and came out blinking and confused why I heard so much giggling.  Becky had waked me to pray so they could eat dinner.  Now that I'm thinking about it I wonder if my stumbling into the living room was part of the "stay single" plan.  Anyway, enough about me, the "single girl party" was a smashing success I'm told.  

Irene has asked me to blog about the washing machine several times.  But I never have.  Our washing machine is a piece of junk.  There are two columns of buttons labeled in Chinese, each with little red lights next to them.  I've never understood all the complexities of washing machines, for twenty years I've just used the "default" setting.  (I had to calculate how long I've done laundry)

Even though I don't know what the buttons say, it doesn't take long to figure out how to get the machine spinning and spraying hot water on my dirty clothes.  Maybe it's just difficult enough to look at those buttons to make you forget to put the drain hose into either the shower drain or into the floor drain in the middle of the bathroom.

Twenty or thirty minutes later you'll be sitting in the living room reading something or chatting with your room-mates yelling loudly above the ridiculously loud banging of the washing machine as it works itself across the bathroom floor, and you'll hear the water gushing...  

Hearing water flowing is perfectly normal when you're within ear-shot of a washing machine.  But something will catch your attention about the sound: it'll be just a little extra clear and crisp sounding. The sound waves will be unhindered by the washing machine's little round glass door, as if they were on the wrong side of it.  What you'll hear is the drain hose pumping several gallons of water onto your bathroom floor.  

Some of the water will spill over the little threshold and into the hallway area outside the bathroom, but not much.  The little shower mat, that I normally step out onto after carefully drying myself and my feet, will be floating if you let the washing machine completely drain out.

You'd think this would be one of those "I'll never let that happen again" things, which all four of us have said to ourselves.  But we've all forgotten that hose at least three times, and there are four of us.  I'm sure it's a simple thing, but there is something mysterious to me about things like this stupid hose that is so easy to forget.   How does that work in my brain?  Have brain scientists ever studied this phenomenon?  It's like the reverse of advertising: How to make someone forget something they want to remember.  Or it's the reverse of a blinking red light that the brain can't ignore.  My phone used to have a blinking red light when it was charging,  I always had to turn it upside down at night because I couldn't ignore that blinking.  Something about that white plastic hose makes our brains forget it.

The positive thing about all of this is that the bathroom floor gets cleaned pretty well when that happens.