Today we salute you Louis Goldenberg!

For those of you who don't know (and don't have the spare time that I have to peruse Wikipedia...seriously you can get lost for hours on that site you start off looking up who invented the washing machine then 3 hours later you're looking at the the holiday celebrations of an indigenous people in a remote village of Costa Rica. I mean not that that happened, I'm just saying) Louis Goldenberg invented the first electric washing machine. A luxury I do not have, but I'm working on it. This brings me to today's life lesson from Bulgaria. I'm not nearly as domestic as I thought I was, or um as I thought I could be. I know my mom would disagree but I think I'm pretty capable of taking care of myself. She was legitimately worried that I would (will?) starve to death here. Mom just so you know, it was touch and go while I went 2 weeks without a refrigerator but now don't worry I'm completely satiated. However, now my attempts at domesticity straddle the fine line between comic and tragic. Let me share with you a couple encounters I've had since living on my own.

Toast. Possibly the easiest food to make in the history of foods. I decided I wanted to get sassy instead of just eating bread, that I would just warm it up a bit. I'm not really sure how to work my oven but I figure hey all you need to do to make toast is get it a little warm, any monkey with opposable thumbs is capable of this. So I throw some bread in the oven and continue to get ready for school. About 2 minutes later I walk back to the kitchen to see smoke billowing out of my oven. I have a new oven, and with that oven came some new manuals that I just forgot to take out. Whoops a daisy I hope it wasn't important. Side note. I still ate that smokey almost toast.

Another pivotal landmark was baby's first time doing laundry. Now I used to silently stew about rummaging through cubbies to get enough quarters together to do laundry and dragging myself to the elevator to go downstairs to the laundry machines. Never again. I'm not even sure what I'm doing. It's not like at wilderness camp where they at least gave you one of those scrubbers and a tin bucket so you felt like you were really roughing it which makes you really excited about doing your laundry by hand. No. It's a plastic bucket. In fact it's a pink plastic bucket. It just screams Troop Beverly Hills. So I do some scrubbing, I do some swirling, then I just kind of let it sit there for probably 2 hours after changing the water a couple of times. I don't know is that right? Washbasins don't come with instruction manuals and if they did they would be in bulgarski. I just don't know, a washing machine just seems more efficient than I could ever be. I've already acknowledged the fact that my clothes will not be downy soft for the next two years but I think a washing machine is a necessary investment OR a very nice birthday present from a very nice mother in America.

I hope everyone is enjoying the last month of summer! Oh and if you don't like to send regular mail, emails are fine too. I like getting any form of contact from you people back home. Next week it'll be 3 months since I left!

Chau