Linkstew

I might bitch a lot about doing dishes, because I don't have a dishwasher and I have to do them by hand and everything. But being home this weekend has made me realize what a crappy job a dishwasher does if you just put the dishes into the dishwasher without scrubbing them a little, first. A dishwasher can't scrub butter off of a knife, for example -- that has to be done by hand no matter which way you slice it.

And doing all of my dishes by hand has shown me that lots of things don't even have to be run through the dishwasher, saving all kinds of electricity and water. Which just means that once I do have a dishwasher some day, I'll just use it sparingly, and not rely on it to actually clean everything magically for me. The commercials might like to lead you to believe that that's how it works, but it actually just leaves ugly dirty dishes.

I have to do dishes all the time. It's the only chore I do regularly, and hence it's the chore I hate the most and which I think about the most. It's also what keeps me from cleaning my bathroom walls or mopping my kitchen floor.

At any rate, when I do dishes I frequent find the stomach of my shirt wet from splashing water. I often changes shirts after doing dishes because my shirt is so wet. Tonight I was thinking about this while I scrubbed away at some former meal in a frying pan, and I realized that a nice water apron with a water resistant surface would be the solution to my wet shirt woes.

Tonight I spent almost two hours washing all of my new dishes, in addition to all the dirty old stuff which I've been too lazy to clean before now. Because I was doing so many dishes, I decided to fill my sink with soapy water and wash everything (though there was so much of it I had to do it in three blocks) and then rinse everything and then dry everything. And after spending that long working in that cycle, I realized how incredibly nice a split sink is. By split sink I mean a sink with two drains and a divider down the center, making two compartments.

You see, tonight I had to fill up my non-split sink, wash things, then either empty the sink and rinse things or let some water out of the sink before rinsing, because there was only one drain. In a split sink, half of the sink can be filled and used to wash, and the other half can be used to rinse and allowed to flow freely. It's a pity I can't replace my sink, because a split sink would make my dishwashing chore much easier. Ah well, something to look forward to after I graduate, I guess.

Saturday always seems to be about cleaning something up somewhere, and this Saturday is no different. I had to do dishes and laundry. I also tidied my room up some and cleaned half of the kitchen sink wih comet, along with wiping down the kitchen counters.

All the kitchen related stuff were things I had to do when I lived at home, and I hated doing them. Why? Because 95% of the time, I wasn't cleaning up my own mess. Now, however, I don't have that much of a problem with cleaning, because it's always my own mess I'm cleaning up. The dishes especially aren't bad compared to at home. Even though it takes a lot longer to get them clean here because I don't have a dishwasher, there is the advantage that when I put the dishes in the sink in the first place, I rinse them and throw the food on them away. At home, no one ever cared what they tossed in the sink, and they nearly never rinsed it, so I had to deal with greasy plates and food and all kinds of other crap that was disgusting that I don't have to deal with in my own kitchen. Same goes for the counters, though that's a little more annoying, because that mess is only half mine, and my roommate doesn't think to clean it because I usually do it every other weekend or so. But it's not that bad to do a quick wipe down, so I don't mind too much.