finally clean?

I visited the skin clinic this morning. The doc was pleased to see that my neck lump is now significantly reduced in size. She asked about itching; I told her I've been trying hard not to scratch; I take an antibacterial wipe and rub it gently over the itchy area now. Otherwise, if no wipe is available, I stifle the urge to scratch, and the urge normally disappears. The doc prescribed me another three days' worth of meds, and that was that. Both the consultation and the pharmacy pickup cost me $3.50 each. There's definitely something to be said for low health-care costs in Korea (although I'm still leery of quality of care, here, when it comes to things beyond pills).

In other news, I finally cleaned my washing machine. Fed up with constantly stinky clothes after every wash (this is a huge problem during the summer months because the clothes emit a strong odor when I heat up and get sweaty), I found some tutorials on YouTube for how to clean out my washer. These proved very helpful, and after putting the washer through three rounds of chemical treatment (baking soda, followed by vinegar, followed by a store-bought cleaner that came with the detergent I'd purchased) and a thorough filter-cleaning, I put in a test load of clothes and was finally rewarded with no odor.

The video tutorials advise cleaning once a month. That seems awfully frequent to me, but I'm paranoid enough about the return of any odor to follow that schedule to the letter.

I do pine for a clothes dryer, though. Koreans don't seem to believe such machines exist, which explains why almost no households have them. (When I taught at Sookmyung University, our international dormitory had a dryer. Some clueless asswipe once thought it was the same as a washer and dumped powdered detergent into it. Anyway, Sookmyung is the only time in my fourteen years in Korea that I've seen a clothes dryer up close.) Clothes dryers run very hot, so they kill odor-causing bacteria. The hidden cost may be that one's washing machine becomes dirtier without one noticing because the dryer is doing such a good job of killing bacteria and removing odor. Then again, with the top-loading washing machine our family had in the States (a Kenmore, I think), I don't recall even once pulling out a stinky load of laundry. I suspect the odor problem is unique to front-loaders.

Laundry is done on Wednesdays and Sundays chez Kevin, so I'll have more chances, soon, to verify my machine is now finally clean.

ADDENDUM: I mention this in the comments below, but to be clear: YES, I have always left the doors open on all the washing machines I've ever used. Please credit me with some intelligence.