We have Kenmore (Sears) front load washer and dryer. [link] In our old place they were stacked, and now we have them side-by-side. They work great and we got rebates from the city for buying efficient units.

Looks like I am going washing machine shopping! I talked to a repair guy this morning and the transmission is gone. He said it would be minimum $200-250 to repair if it's only the transmission, but he wouldn't know for sure until he took the machine apart. I also looked up the average lifespan of a washing machine, and it seems to be from 7-13 years. Mines' at least 12, probably older.

I did find this neat PDF doc that tells you the expected lifespan of everything in your house.:

[link]

Thanks, Scrappy. I think if my bonus comes out reasonable I'll have to start doing some shopping around. I can live with the washer but I hadn't even realized how much the dryer situation was frustrating me until I started talking about it. I should be able to cut a pretty good deal these days, right? You'd think, anyway.

Hell, you could probably find yourself a good deal on a barely used one from a foreclosed home, in the right neighborhood.

Mark Morford had a good column on SFGate.com about dropping back into a reflex position of remembering that Obama is president and things could be much much worse.

Yeah, we bought new older model high efficiency Kenmores and we love them. We leave the washer door and detergent drawer open for a bit after use and have had no problems with smell. We live in the desert, so humidity's not a factor, but still. They work well, the washer wrings them out so well that the dryer hardly takes any time, and we're about to start using the outside line anyway.

Our longest cycle time is about 84 minutes, I think, for super duper nuke the germs white cycle. The dryer time varies, but the only time it's been a problem is drying our king-sized flannel duvet cover, because it gets all folded up and doesn't dry at the folds.

Other than that it's been awesome other than the time I tried to wash a mop head. It said it was washable! It was not. But thanks to the internets, I disassembled and cleaned out the plugged up filter myself.

For people who couldn't get a good view of the Oscar's In Memoriam segment.

That was lovely. I had missed the beginning, so thank you, ita. Queen Latifah did such a great job with the song, too.

Mona did pretty okay at school today.

Aced figure eights, but still won't stay, or stand for examination. Still nips at strangers who try to pet her.

Good at heeling, and still ridiculously funny.

Got resumes out to SpaceX and JPL, and some of the bigger physics blogs are sending out an APB to see if anyone needs a departmental secretary.

I still feel enormously stupid, and angry that my dream job went to a pinhead who knows nothing of science but is more "Hollywood" than I am.

Though, they never called Tim and David for references. I mean, shit. I had two pretty well-known (in the industry) television producers who offered their home numbers up to give me a reference, and NAS never called.

And at the end of March, I'm unemployed, and I have too little in savings to sustain myself for more than a month.

This is NO GOOD. And gah, I feel stupid and betrayed and scared.

But my dog can heel. So that's good.

My BiL and SiL have an LG w/d all-in-one (they're pretty common in teeny London apartments) and they never use it as a dryer because it's faster to hang everything up and let it air-dry.

We have a HE Bosch set (separate washer/dryer) and the dryer is okay. Our issue is that because we have nowhere to vent, we had to get the electric condensation model, which just doesn't work as well as one with a vent would. Our clothes get dry, but it does take about 2 hours.

Allyson, please tell that nasty little voice at the back of your brain to shut up, because really, you do rock, and getting personal references/networking is going to work for you, for sure.