The water in Liederbach is so hard....

.....How hard is it?

It's so hard that you always have to filter your water before putting it in your coffee maker, there's always hard water buildup around your faucets and...

...the insides of your 2½-year old washing machine calcifies and stops working.

Our washing machine started malfunctioning last week -- running for 10 minutes and then shutting itself off and fiddling with the circuit breakers as well. All evidence pointed to an electrical problem.

Thank goodness a repairman was able to come within a few days. And the problem ended up being not an electrical one, but a water one. He explained to David that the water here is so hard, we should have been putting a special chemical into the washer with every load. That was news to us. We had never heard that before. David checked at work and no one there had ever heard of such a thing.

Our landlord happened to stop by that afternoon and told me that there is a gallon-size water softener in the basement that must need to be replaced. We'll still need to filter our water for coffee and use special cleaners to get rid of the hard-water buildup around the faucets, but the washing machine should be OK from now on.