Thanksgiving Advent, Day Seventeen: Dishwashers etc.

[swan_tower]

I lived for about five years in places without a dishwasher. (Well, longer than that -- but the four years in college don't count, since all I had to do was dump my tray at the appropriate spot in the dining hall.)

I am so very, very thankful to have one again.

Dishes fall into that deeply annoying category of "didn't I just do this chore?" No sooner have you cleaned them up than, oh look, there's another dirty plate. Laundry is the same way, and words cannot express how glad I am that I've never had to do that by hand. The one time I ever tried was with a pair of trousers when I was at a field station in the middle of the rainforest in Costa Rica; I got about a minute in, very feebly, before a pair of hands appeared in my field of vision and took the soap and trousers away. I watched the very nice Costa Rican lady do what my fourteen-year-old self could not, and marveled as if she were turning water in to wine. Combine that with my reading about what it used to take to do laundry in the pre-washing-machine past . . . yeah. There are entire months of my life that have been saved by me not having to do laundry by hand.

Dishwashers. Laundry machines. Vacuum cleaners. Hell, showers -- even bathing used to be a bigger undertaking, back when you had to heat the water and fill the tub and so on. Be thankful, people. Be very, very thankful.

Comments

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Buttercup 2.0, the house I live in with my friends, has a small dishwasher. We were looking forward to it. It broke before we moved in-- it doesn't drain properly.

So instead it's a drying rack. It's actually really handy having a place to put all the dishes that doesn't take up counter space and sometimes has a heated dry setting. We'd rather have a dishwasher that washes, but we'll take this as well.

As for laundry... I'm probably going to buy more socks and underwear and keep an eye out for more jeans because then I can go another two weeks or so between gigantic laundry weekends. And ours are in the same house, free!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's at least nice to keep the drying dishes out of the way. When I didn't have a dishwasher, I generally didn't have a lot of counter space, either -- funny how those often go hand-in-hand. But it's even nicer to have a dishwasher.