Hey, are your cottons gonna shrink

[austin_dern]

I'd picked my hotel arbitrarily, looking for one that wasn't too far from the office. I didn't do too badly --- it had a 24-hour Dunkin Donuts built into the lobby --- but there were some unsatisfying aspects. For one, all the rooms opened to the outside, which meant I couldn't go to the laundry room without bundling up. For another, I couldn't find the laundry room; the spot on the hotel map just had a tiny vending machine alcove. (It turned out the laundry room was in that spot but on the next floor up.) For yet another, the laundry room was out of order pretty much my whole time there.

Now, there's this laundromat in the city a couple blocks down the office. It caught my eye daily because I could see inside they'd painted the walls with an under-the-sea theme that doesn't actually infringe on Disney's Little Mermaid characters, believe it or not. On the way in, near the end of the ride, I could see some dolphins and whales and such; on the way out, well, a couple mermaids. So this was at long last a natural chance to stop in and see what the whole place was like.

It was about what you'd imagine: a small laundromat in the city that spruced things up by painting under-the-sea stuff on its walls. The only surprising thing was that none of the machines were coin-operated; you had to buy a card, instead, and from a vending machine because there weren't any attendants. Since I went after work hours I don't know if that was only true then or if there's pretty much never anybody there. Also, laundromats are more expensive than I remember, but I haven't needed one in years.

I wondered whether to keep my card, with like 75 cents left on it after my drying was done, in case I needed it next time; and then I thought about whether it was very likely that on a fresh trip east I'd again stay in a hotel with only one washing machine and that one broken for the entire week, and left the card for someone who finds him- or herself 75 cents short for a dryer load.

Trivia: The 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo were the largest yet staged, with 49 countries (twelve more than in 1980) and over 1,500 athletes. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: The Kind Of Motion We Call Heat: A History Of The Kinetic Theory of Gases In The 19th Century, Volume I, Stephen G Brush.