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

[kurayami-hime.livejournal.com]

This. A thousand times this.

Now pardon me while I go hand wash my plate from lunch. ::tears::

[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!

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

These conveniences do definitely change the way we do things. I grew up in a household without a washer/dryer or a dishwasher. The dishwasher wasn't a big deal - we weren't a huge family, and except for special occasions my grandmother's favorite cooking too was a can opener. She'd spent most of her life running a retail business, first with my grandfather, and then by herself after he passed away in 1950. She grabbed something at the local diner a lot until she sold the business and retired.

The laundry thing was painful. It meant that we approached clothes with an older perspective - you looked at it and determined if it *needed* to be washed, instead of just tossing it in the hamper without a thought. To this day I generate about half the laundry that my spouse does because of those habits. Of course now that's good for water conservation too.

Lighting is another one. We had a freak snowstorm at the end of Oct. in the northeast, and for lots of us it involved multiple days without power. We're pretty well equipped for that, although heat was an issue, but doing things by oil lamp really limits what you want to try to do in the evenings.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. Dishwasher and washing machine and vacuum cleaner. Also, while we're at it, fridge and freezer--I eat a lot more fresh food than your average American, but I do not have the energy to shop every day for it, so being able to have a gallon of milk and some cucumbers in the fridge is so good.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

I remember when I came back from India after 6 weeks (4 weeks without running water, 2 weeks of sort-of-running cold water with no pressure in the pipes). I went straight into the bathroom, and stood under the warm shower for 15 minutes. It was glorious.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

I'm living with a dishwasher now, for the first time in my life. I've stopped even trying to use it to wash my dishes. It's marginally useful for storing dishes, so I can make room in the sink to wash one sinkful and room on the counter to dry them, but not as useful as a proper double sink would be.

People who have lived with dishwashers all their lives tell me that a larger, faster, and more powerful dishwasher would actually clean my dishes, instead of sequestering all the hot water for three times the amount of time it would take to wash them in the sink and spraying them with a thin layer of detergent residue over the food. This might be true, but I'm in no hurry to find out; a dishwasher is not a high priority for the next apartment. (No double sink, however, is going to be an absolute deal-breaker from now on.)

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

We have a dishwasher but we rarely use it.