COLUMN: Washer/Dryer

If you grew up watching The Jetsons like me, don't you feel cheated a little?

For a good portion of my childhood, I fully expected that once I became an adult, I would live in a house in the sky, drive a flying car, get around on moving sidewalks, and own a sassy robot maid that did my every bidding.

Well, thus far the future seems woefully lacking in sassy robot maids. There isn't a moving sidewalk in sight. And, apart from that one time I took a backroads hill in the country a little too fast, my car hasn't had much flight time whatsoever. I hate to say it, but the future's kind of a rip-off.

I guess The Jetsons got a FEW things right. We do have video phones, smart watches, and flatscreen TVs. Siri isn't especially sassy, but she WILL answer questions, give me directions, and tell me lousy jokes. There was a time when the internet probably sounded every bit as far-fetched and futuristic as flying cars, and now I feel like I'm in mortal danger of being cut adrift from society anytime I leave the house without a smartphone in my pocket. In a lot of ways, we ARE every bit as future-cool as The Jetsons.

But this week, I took future-cool up a notch at Casa Del Shane.

If you happened to read last week's column, you know I had a bit of an issue recently wherein my basement decided to temporarily identify as a swimming pool. With the whole basement torn up and drying out, it was the perfect opportunity for an appliance upgrade.

My old washer and dryer came with the house, and I've never been a big fan. I honestly don't think they were too great when they were spanky new, let alone a couple decades old. The washer's spin cycle made the whole unit convulse up and down like it was at a Ramones gig at CBGBs circa 1979. It was about as loud as a Ramones gig, too. The dryer seemed more concerned with slowly turning all my clothes into lint than it did cleaning them. As long as I had everything disconnected and the basement torn apart, I figured I might as well use the opportunity to step up my laundry game.

I am now Future Laundry Awesome Shane Guy. I've had my new washer & dryer for three days now, and I'm still basking in this strange novelty feeling where, for the first time in my life, I actually WANT to do laundry. I'm guessing this sensation will pass in about two hours.

This is perfect timing, because two hours is also roughly the length of time it takes to wash one load of whites in the new washer, which is why I'm very confused. I kind of assumed that a high-tech, high-efficiency washer of the future would mean that your clothes cleaned in record time. My old funky washer would clean a load of clothes in roughly 25 minutes and then the dryer would take roughly an hour to beat them into submission.

These new futuro machines are the exact opposite. It only takes my new dryer about a half hour to fully dry a load of clothes, but that's because the washer has spent the past hour-and-a-half whirling them into oblivion. The load of whites I just did seriously had a 20-minute spin cycle. I would think that after five or ten minutes of spinning, you'd exhaust the limits of physics when it comes to spinning away water molecules, but I am clearly no laundry scientist (as exemplified by the little specks on many of my t-shirts from the day I learned the hard lesson of why you SHOULDN'T just toss a dishrag in the laundry that you just used to clean your counter with a Clorox spray.

It turns out "high efficiency" doesn't mean "I get things done fast." Instead, it must mean "I get things done with very little water." In my inaugural load, I was surprised to see the washer only fill up about a third of the way before it started making my clothes do the Harlem Shake. At first, I thought it was broken. Then I discovered that's "high efficiency" - it cleans your clothes in WAY less water, but it takes twice as long because it needs to shimmy all your clothes down into the small tidepool of water it's working with. I'm going to save quite a bit on my next water bill, which is great, because I'll need it for the power bill increase from running my washer for twice as long. 

It took a while, but I did eventually discover the future technologies at play in this washer/dryer unit. Growing up, whenever our family dryer would finish a cycle, it made an alert that sounded like a sad clown honking an air horn. When my old dryer here finished a load, it had the unlimited gall to simply shut off without issuing ANY kind of alert. My NEW dryer, however, plays a spirited one-minute-long electronic fanfare of beeps and boops that sounds like Kraftwerk covering a sea shanty. Clearly, this was well worth emptying my savings for.

So here's to you, new washer and dryer. At the end of the day, they clean my clothes pretty well and they're about eleventy times quieter than their predecessors. They might not be flying cars, but I still feel like I'm living just a little farther in the future than I was last week. I still don't have a sassy maid, but I DO now have a dryer that just sent me a text message because it talked to my washer, found out it's washing a load of delicates, and is wondering if it needs to set itself to "tumble dry low." If that's not the future, I dunno what is.

COLUMN: Basement Flood

Who among us doesn't love a good shortcut?

I take my laziness seriously. If there's a way to cut a corner or speed up a process, I'm all for it. If I stumble into an ad for some new product designed to make life easier, even if it's some sketchy 2 a.m. infomercial, I'll usually at least take the time to hear 'em out. There's nothing better than discovering a new household hack with the potential to simplify an annoying chore, thus enabling me to focus on more pressing matters -- specifically, the matter of me pressing my butt onto a couch cushion.

This much dedication to the art of lethargy requires focus, fortitude, and commitment. Excelling in laziness takes innovation, trial and error, and thinking outside the box.

Take some mundane task like -- oh, I dunno -- doing a load of laundry or something. Laundry is a time-consuming and resource-wasting affair that just seems full of huge gaps of wasted time where you're idly standing around waiting for some machine to stop running. That time could clearly be better spent laying on a couch watching bad TV or staring into space thinking about absolutely nothing. As all the infomercials say: "There's GOT to be a better way!"

For example, think about how long it takes your washer to empty. Every single time you run a load of laundry, you've got to stand there for an eternity while all that dirty water drains out of the wash basin. What a waste of time, am I right? Well, here's where thinking outside the box really pays off. Hear me out, now -- WHAT IF, instead of waiting for that dirty water to travel allll the way through your pipes and out to the sewer, you instead simply dumped all that water directly onto your basement floor. Wouldn't that be a great timesaver?

Answer: No. It would not. Trust me on this one. I have officially tried it out.

My first clue should've been my cat. At 7:00 p.m., I had thrown a load of laundry in the wash. One of my cats loves to lie down in front of the washer and demand belly-rubs from any passing human, even if said human is lugging around piles of dirty clothes. But when I went back to move the clothes to the dryer, I noticed my cat had moved from the floor to higher ground on the couch. The second thing I noticed was that my feet were wet.

Yep. Somehow my washer had backed up and dumped an entire wash cycle AND an entire rinse cycle full of water alllllll over my basement floor. The carpet was sopping. The clothes waiting for the next load were sopping. Water was pooling up on the opposite end of the basement. It was everywhere.

"WHY DIDN'T YOU COME GET ME?" I yelled at my cat. She looked back at me and said, and I quote, "Meow." I'm pretty sure I meowed back but it may have just been an angry scream.

I'm not saying I had a ton of hot plans for this week, but none of them involved attempting to set the world record for the number of dehumidifiers running simultaneously in the same basement. It's been four days now, and things are starting to get better. I think its safe to say we've now moved from wet to moist, which is an improvement. Much of this is due to my dad, who has been dutifully driving up from Galesburg every day to solve the mystery of what happened.

At first, we assumed the washer had suffered some sort of tramautic rupture, but we learned that wasn't the case when I ran some water down the kitchen sink only to have it jet out the washer pipes as if my basement was the fountains at the Bellagio. Nope, there was a blockage somewhere in my pipes.

Dad ran a 25' snake down the sink to try and clear it out. Then we second-guessed our work and did it all over again for good measure. Then we third-guessed our second guess and paid a pro to come out and ensure that every drain in my house now empties swiftly into the bowels of Hell.

This also brought about the realization that my washer and dryer -- which came with the house -- were pretty old and funky, and what better time to replace them than while they're disconnected and decommissioned to higher ground? So I've been unexpectedly appliance shopping and rapidly realizing I have no idea what I'm doing. Front load or top load? Direct drive or belt? Doors that open to the left or the right? 

I checked out reviews of the top models in an attempt to narrow down the field some. Instead, I learned things like, "Great wash options, but sometimes has problems connecting to wi-fi." Wait, WHAT? There are SMART WASHERS now?? We actually now live in a world where I can sit on my couch, pull out my phone, and tell my washer exactly when to start a new load? And it'll send me a text message the second the clothes are done? Sign. Me. Up. 

Let the cavalcade of laziness commence! Well, as soon as the floor's dry enough to install new appliances, I guess. No one sells self-drying, Bluetooth-enabled Smart Basements, do they? 

COLUMN: Grusch

If you're a regular reader of this column, you likely know I'm a sucker for any good tale about UFOs, UAPs, aliens, or any unexplained and/or potentially extra-terrestrial weirdness in the skies. Every time I look up at the stars, there's a tiny part of me that hopes to see a flying saucer wave back. In reality, these are NOT ideal things to wish for. I have a feeling most aliens cruising past our planet are likely less interested in having us to dinner as they are having us FOR dinner.

But it might be time to make those dinner plans now. A new report is out, and, spoiler alert: Aliens are real. UFOs are real. This information comes to us in a shocking new allegation by Some Random Guy. And frankly, what kind of world do we live in if we can't listen to the warnings of some random guy and believe every word he says without a shred of credible evidence? After all, this seems to be a policy that's worked successfully for people on the internet for years.

This particular Some Random Guy, though, might merit a listen. His name is David Charles Grusch, and he comes with a pedigree that sounds awfully impressive. In fact, the big article this week in which Grusch turns alien whistleblower seems less concerned about Grusch's claims than it does listing his resume in hopes of proving he's more than your run-of-the-mill nutbag pointing to the sky and yelling "aliens!" He was a former combat officer in Afghanistan. He's a veteran of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, which are both apparently real things that exist. On paper, his credibility seems solid.

And Grusch says alien ships are real and we've got 'em.

According to his claims, the U.S. government has been sweeping up crashed UFOs for decades, and that the objects retrieved are "of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures." In other words, according to our boy Dave: UFO's are real, we've got some, and we've been covering up their existence for decades. He hasn't actually SEEN any of these otherworldly Ubers, but he's talked to people who have.

Dave's story has been making headlines all week, because he's certainly one of the more credible voices to ever turn UFO whistleblower. In fact, he vetted his disclosure with the Department of Defense first, who approved his statements as "cleared for open publication" back in April. Of course, Dave doesn't offer much in the way of evidence, and his statements are broad and generalized. It's not as if he said, "And one of the UFO's is in a bunker in Indiana. Here's the address. Ask for Doug and tell him you want to speak with Voltrax of the planet Gorgon 5."   

But for the government to even allow a generalized vague statement purporting the existence of UFOs, let alone a claim that we're secretly collecting and studying them, would've been unthinkable just years ago. But over the past few administrations, it seems like the government has slowly been warming to the idea that it might not be entirely out of this world to admit that there are some things in the night sky that could be entirely out of this world. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this.

I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. I was a nerd and my friends were nerds -- and as such, we had a duty to oft contemplate the existence of little green men. I'm fully convinced that we are not alone in the universe. As I've said before, it seems a little egotistical to look up at the night sky and assume that we're the only planet whose inhabitants had the wherewithal to grow legs and walk out of the primordial ooze. 

For most of my life, I've yearned for full transparency from our government as to any evidence of aliens or UFOs. But my opinion may have changed on that.

After what I've witnessed from society lately, I'm starting to think maybe some secrets should just stay secret. We've all had a front-row seat of just how well everyone coped with the introduction of ONE new viral microbe into our festival line-up. Imagine how well things would play out if a flying saucer came down on national TV and a Martian named Kevin jumped out like, "W'sup?"

Somehow we'd instantly find a way to make it political. Would we see Kevin the Martian as a friend or an enemy? CNN and Fox would endlessly debate it to death. Twitter wars would erupt over which bathrooms we'd allow Kevin to use. Maybe Kevin would endorse a brand of beer and cause half the country to lose their minds. Taylor Swift could go on a date with Kevin and break the entire internet, causing global unrest and mass pandemonium.

So, to my new friend David Grusch, I say this: "Shh." We've spent the last decade sailing this ship directly into the middle of a typhoon, so maybe we shouldn't do anything to rock the boat any harder. I mean, you could tell ME, though. I'm trustworthy. I certainly won't write a column about where the aliens are and/or ask you 1,436 times for a ride in your UFO. Promise. 

COLUMN: Brat Emergency

If there's one thing life's pretty good at, it's knocking you down a peg or two whenever you get a little full of yourself.

The list of things I'm pretty good at is ever-evolving, but it's not especially long. I'm pretty good at picking music for a party. If a song comes on the radio, I can generally tell you with a decent degree of accuracy how many beats per minute its tempo is. I'm rather skilled at watching TV for problematically lengthy time periods. I know an absurd amount of useless pop culture trivia. I strangely have a decent sense of direction and seldom get lost.

Oh, and one other thing: I've become pretty good at cooking. I mean, probably not as good as most of you. But compared to where I was a few years ago? I'm Julia Child compared to THAT guy. There was once a time when my greatest culinary triumph was successfully adding the Helper to the hamburger, and I've even been known to screw THAT up. But during the pandemic, I decided it was time to learn some basic cooking skills. One Instant Pot, one air fryer, and eleventy-jillion Youtube videos later, I can actually make meals for myself without burning the house down.

Or so I thought.

Last Friday, I decided to grill a couple brats on my lunch hour using the "smokeless grill" setting on my air fryer. It lied. As they were cooking, nature came a-calling, so I used the opportunity for a quick rest in the restroom. It wasn't quick enough. Nothing puts a spring in one's step off the toilet quite like thick smoke rolling past the bathroom door. 

Apparently no one told the air fryer it was "smokeless." The brats had split their casing, and all that deliciousness was dripping to the bottom of the grill and turning into a toxic fog cascading out of my kitchen in dramatic fashion. It looked like the Sisters of Mercy were about to play a gig in my dining room. 

I unplugged the air fryer and opened a nearby window, but it was too late. Before I could even utter a single swear word, my upstairs smoke detector started going off. I raced upstairs to shut it off and suddenly found myself completely clueless as to how one does that. There was no obvious off-switch or reset button. The sound was so shrill, so loud, and so piercing that I couldn't even think. In desperation, I ripped it off the wall and it just kept on beeping. I ran with it downstairs, popped the back off the thing, and spent the next five minutes desperately trying to pry the batteries out of their hermetically-sealed compartment.

All the while, the alarm is Bluetoothed to my security system, which meant somewhere someone in a monitoring center was dispatching a fire brigade to my house. By the time I got the infernal alarm shut off and reached them to cancel the call, I was a nervous wreck. My ears were ringing. My cats were running concentric circles around the house. Instead of a relaxing lunch hour, I returned to work with frayed nerves and a wicked migraine and frayed nerves. But that was just the opening act of my holiday weekend.

On Sunday, I stayed up way too late watching bad TV and didn't get to bed until the wee hours. At about an hour past wee, I woke up to the gentle lullabye of my security alarm once again shrieking. I always felt safe going to sleep in the comforting knowledge that my house was being guarded by a security system. I never realized that triggering it in the middle of the night runs the distinct risk of scaring me dead.

My first thought was, "AM I DYING?" My second thought was, "IS THE WORLD ENDING?" My third thought was re-assuring: "No, silly, it's your security alarm going off. The world isn't ending. You're simply about to be murdered is all." Someone must have been breaking in. Good thing I had left a deadly weapon on the nightstand. That deadly weapon? A dessert fork. Whoever was breaking into this house picked the wrong midnight snacker to mess with.

I crept out of the bedroom with dessert fork in ninja attack stance. The alarm was just as shrill and migraine-inducing as ever, but the second I walked out of the bedroom, it stopped and I almost screamed. Suddenly, a voice echoed throughout my house and I DID scream. "Mr. Brown? Sanjay at monitoring. Are you alright?" It was my security company.

"I have no idea," I yelled into the air. "Someone might be here, Sanjay. But I'm armed!" (I left off "...with a dessert fork.")

"Mr. Brown," Sanjay said, "The sensor is indicating that someone has tampered with your smoke detector which is what set off the alarm. Can you verify please?"

I don't know much about home intruders, but here's what I do know. Odds were pretty slim that a na'er-do-well would break in and sneak up flights of stairs while carrying the stepladder necessary to maliciously reach and tamper with said smoke detector. Apparently, when I remounted the smoke detector to the wall last weekend, I messed something up.

"Sanjay, no one tampered with my smoke detector except me a few days ago."

"Sir," he replied, "Can you try turning it off and on again?"

The list of things I'm pretty good at remains small. I'm no longer including cooking on that list. However, the list of things I'm BAD at now most definitely includes "rebooting smoke detectors at 3:24 a.m. with my friend Sanjay."

For the record, those brats were pretty tasty.