How to do the Laundry

I was talking to Mom and Dad yesterday (Happy Birthday Mom!), and they pointed out that I've neglected to explain several of the more mundane tasks of my life. With that thought in mind, here's a quick summary of how I do my laundry. I promise it's at least a little more interesting than it sounds.
Step one: plug in the washer. We only have one plug in the washer/dryer area, so we can only use one at a time.
Step two: put clothes in washer. The washer is much smaller than my old American one. We used to make about a load of laundry a week (unsorted). Now we make two.
Step three: turn on washer.
Step four: push the start button. For the record, there are many many choices as far as cycle selection go. They're all in Japanese, though. We have instructions in English, but I've currently misplaced them, so we're running everything on standard at the moment. Oops.
At this point, the washer will jiggle the clothes around a few times. Then it will light up a button which indicates how much detergent you need. There are four levels and they're in picture form. Most of our loads are the most detergent, which means we're running full loads. It is interesting sometimes, though, to see how much it will tell you. I guess it does it by weight, so some loads that look full are really small, others that look small are full.
Step five: Put in detergent. Another disadvantage of not currently having the directions is that I'm confident there's a place for softener, but I can't remember which place it is.
Step six: close the lid and wait.
The washer will then behave like a perfectly normal washer, except with like three spin cycles. The clothes are much dryer when it's done than they were in my old machine. When it's done, it beeps politely at me.
Step seven: Take laundry out of the washer.
Then I have to make a decision. If the laundry in question is stuff I don't mind displaying to our neighbors, and it's a sunny day, it goes out on the patio where we have three rods to hang dry things. Everyone hangs out their clothes to dry around here. It kind of makes sense, because 1) the dryer takes like three hours to work anyway and 2) it's even smaller than the washer. As a result, I've taken to doing laundry first thing in the morning when the patio is still sunny.
If I don't want the neighbors to see it, the laundry goes in the dryer. This involved unplugging the washer, plugging in the dryer and then basically following the same process as washing. There's a separate on and start button, for example. I have managed to memorize the kanji for the cycle which is "Less shrink," so I'm good there. Then I just have to be patient, because it takes forever.
Also, at the end of every load, I have (count them) four lint traps to clean. One is in the washer, and is a little baggie looking thing which just has to be flipped inside out to be emptied. The other three are in the back of the dryer as one big lint-catching contraption. So I have to pull them all out, scrape off the ones that need scraping, and then vacuum the one that needs vaccuming (no, really, that's what the instructions say to do).
It's quite a process, and if we were a family of five, I'd probably be frustrated. Luckily, I like doing laundry and it doesn't require a ton of attention, just time.
Other success stories for the last few days:
I successfully drove to Hario housing all by myself. It's half an hour from main base, and I'd only ever been there by bus before.
I successfully got on the sub list at the high school here. The background check must have gotten through because I got a letter saying that I'm accepted now.
I successfully got an A in my first grad school class. And not just any A, I got 100%. Go me! :-)