Wicked

As part of my personal effort to reduce my energy consumption, I've been hanging my clothes to dry rather than using the coin-operated dryer in the basement. Since I live in a one bedroom apartment, this does take up a fair bit of living space on wash day. I have one of the Frost drying racks from Ikea; I can get about one and a half loads of laundry on that, then I have a clothes line in the bedroom and another folding wooden rack. Since this takes up most of my bedroom, I turn on an electric box fan and aim it at the drying clothes to speed up the process a bit. On a normal day, everything but for the thickest socks and sweatshirts are dry in about four hours. This had me thinking about the energy savings (was I really saving energy by eschewing the dyer but using a fan?), so I used this calculator to tab it up. If I run the fan only for drying clothes, it tots up to 1.6 Kilowatt hours per month (about 20 cents worth at Duke Energy prices,) versus using the electric dryer for the same amount of laundry - 40 kWh/mo or $4.80. So I am saving both energy and money. That's cool.

I went to see the musical "Wicked" at the Aronoff matinée today. The stand-in for Elphaba was on stage today, Ms. Donna Vivino, and she was incredible. What a voice. Somehow or the other we scored box seats and it was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.