Little Cat Z 蘇斯博士的小貓

Do you remember Dr. Seuss's tale, "The Cat In The Hat?" The Cat in the Hat starts entertaining two kids stuck at home. Soon, that entertainment causes all sorts of trouble. The Cat in the Hat promises to fix everything and he keeps bringing out more "Little Cats A, B, C, D, etc." to help, but every fix causes more trouble! Finally, the Cat in the Hat produces "Little Cat Z," and therein lies the final solution.

We had our own "Cat In The Hat" situation: laundry.



It all started when we were figuring out how to clean our clothes. For various reasons, we decided it was still best to have our own washing machine. Okay, so now we can wash the clothes, but what will we do with the wet stuff? Our apartment is right on the street and we have no yard. We don't even have a covered balcony like the upper story apartments do. Where can we safely dry the clothes? Hmm...so we also got a dryer. Problem solved? Not quite.

Check out the picture at the left. The reason you don't see a duct behind the dryer is not because it's hidden; it's simply not there! This little utility room has no ventilation. None. So where does all the moisture from the dryer go? Um...into the room. Now the "Cat In The Hat" metaphor really kicks in.

Here's a "green" idea! We'll save electricity by hanging stuff to air dry, reducing the volume of clothes in the dryer will shorten the length of time the dryer has to run. So we hung up a bunch of stuff in the laundry room.

But wait...the air drying clothes are evaporating the same volume of moisture into the utility room. It's no different from drying them in the dryer.

No problem. We'll just run one of our handy-dandy dehumidifiers in the utility room whenever we use the dryer. Yeah, that's the ticket! We'll aim the dry exhaust at the hanging clothes so they'll dry even more quickly! Excellent!

Hang on a second...let's get this straight: now we're using one electrical appliance to get moisture out of the clothes and blow it into the room, and we're using a second electrical appliance to suck that moisture out of the room and dry off some other clothes that we didn't put into the first electrical appliance. How "green" is this, exactly?

We needed "Little Cat Z," the one with "zoom" in his hat, the one that solves everything in the end. In fact, we had "Little Cat Z" all along, and we knew it. It's the sun, the outside air, the breeze that blows almost constantly in these foothills! We just couldn't figure out how to use it.

Thanks to Ping's dad's wonderful hammer drill, a pulley system, and a long pole, we came up with a much better solution. It's pretty much what everyone does around here, in one way or another: we hung up our clothes to dry outside. Wait. Wasn't that where we started? Yes.

The coolest thing about this is that we were able to put it on the side of the house, away from the street, and under the overhanging second floor. We can lower the bar to hang or retrieve the clothes, and raise it up out of reach and out of the way when we're done.

It's still visible from the street but it's not immediately accessible from the street!

When the weather is decent (and today is wonderful!), we can do a load of laundry, and just hang everything out there to dry.

Hurray for "Little Cat Z!" Problem solved.