3:00 AM – Wake up. Raining hard. The rain sounds nice. Everyone else is still sleeping, even the kittens. Go downstairs, let in the big cats, feed big cats and one kitten. Go looking throughout house for other kitten. FInd her, feed her too.
3:20 AM – It took 20 minutes to feed the cats?
3:25 AM – Start writing
4:30 AM – Update nanowrimo draft 1 word count. It’s over 50,000, yay. Far from finished, though. A mess, to be honest. Type a little more. Check email.
5:00 AM – Celebrate by going back to bed for an hour.
5:15 AM – Give up, go back downstairs to kitchen, hang out with Alpha.
6:00 AM – Pack lunch for Gamma.
6:15 AM – Shower, shave.
6:30 AM – Wake and feed Gamma. Empty dishwasher. Fill dishwasher. Clean litter boxes.
7:00 AM – Start nagging Gamma to get ready.
7:20 AM – Last call. We really have to leave now.
7:30 AM – Leave for school. Drop Gamma, continue on to work.
8:30 AM – 5:30 PM – Random shit. Maybe hit Apple store at lunch to look at xmas gifts for Beta.
7:00 PM – Run buffet at Beta’s harp concert, somehow.
8:00 PM – Lose all cognitive functioning, due to getting up at 3 AM.
9:00 PM – Go out for drinks with harp people after concert, etc.
10:00 PM – Go to bed or fall asleep in restaurant, depending on location.
6:30AM…Empty dishwasher. Fill dishwasher….
Is there anything in the world more soul-destroying than this? I don’t think I could face the litter boxes after that.
i forgot the massive nosebleed at 4:45 AM.
I use dishwashers only rarely, like after cooking and serving Thanksgiving dinner. Other than that, it seems easier just to wash the dishes by hand and set them in the rack to drain and air dry. This was true even when my daughters were still living with me.
Oh, I must disagree with that. I washed all dishes by hand for seven years due to not having a dishwasher, and to me THAT is the most soul-sucking household chore in the world. I guess I must have whined enough, because my parents got me a portable dishwasher for my birthday last year. It takes up a lot of room in the kitchen, but it’s worth the sacrifice of some space to me.
Mig – What’s with the getting up at 3 a.m.?! I often haven’t even gone to bed yet at at 3 a.m. I hope this is not a regular practice for you.
it’s soul-sucking in that it is never ending.
but it is very nice to have a dishwasher, yars. this is the first apartment i’ve ever lived in that had a (working) one. my apartment in New York had a dishwasher, but it was out of service when we signed the lease with the understanding that the landlady would have it fixed before we moved in. well, you can see where it went from there. it still wasn’t fixed when we moved out. eventually, we just docked a bit off our rent for it and the landlady was perfectly fine with that.
?
crazy woman. boy, i lived in some tenements then, but we won’t go there…
I don’t know what it is about doing dishes by hand that gets to me… Laundry is also a never-ending chore (especially with a six-year-old boy about) but that one does not suck my soul out anywhere near as much as the dishes do. I used to do rounds with my ex-husband about that one. We’d agree that I’d do dishes if he’d cook (we both hated doing dishes with equal passion), then he would cook but would use EVERY DISH IN THE HOUSE in the process. Literally. And then just leave the whole mess in the kitchen for me. Argh.
So now my son and I cook things mostly in the microwave in their own nice little disposable trays, and then we put the forks/spoons/sporks in the dishwasher.
our dishes rule avoids that problem: usually the cook does the dishes, unless that cook is cooking all the time, or is otherwise tired, or has a different good excuse, then the other people help with the dishes, or don’t help, and get yelled at.
I would very happily wash all the dishes by hand if someone else would do the cooking; but I stand by what I said about dishwashers; I hate the things. To me a dishwasher is just another place I have to remember to look when trying to find my favorite mug or a particular pan I want to use. And scraping dishes, loading them, waiting until there are enough to run it, then unloading the dishwasher; not to mention having to stop the thing midcycle to retrieve something I need immediately – I could have the dishes washed, dry and put away in less time than all this takes, and with a lot less trouble.
I do realise that I seem to be in the minority, though.
I’m a single mom. I’d be happy to have someone else do ANYTHING, quite frankly. Which is why I like my dishwasher… it’s like having a someone else who is rather limited in their capacity to perform tasks, but performs their one task faithfully and without complaining.
Now I just need a machine to put the clean dishes away.
I am also a single mother, although my children are grown. I raised them alone, frequently working two jobs, without even the court ordered child support I was supposed to get. My point about dishwashers, is, that in my opinion, they take up more of my time and energy than washing the dishes by hand. That’s why I don’t like them. Other reasons too, but that one is enough!
it is 3.17 AM. the dishes in my dishwasher are clean, but putting them away makes too much noise so i’ll wait until people are up. more dishes are clean and dry in the rack next to the sink. they are the things that were too big to put into the dishwasher, or made of wood, like spoons or knives with wooden handles, and so cannot be machine washed. they will be put away later, too.
what i resent about dishwashers most is the necessity to wash dishes before putting them in the machine. dishwashers should be renamed. another broken promise. we have no problem filling ours, maybe European dishwashers are smaller, maybe we just use a lot of dishes. not so small that a kitten wont’t fit inside. ours like to climb in and lick dirty dishes and silverware. we have to give it a good check, or count cats, before firing it up.
Very clean kittens! :D
I don’t *wash* dishes before putting them in, but I do give them the most perfunctory of rinses. Meaning I turn on the faucet, hold the dish under there for a second or two, then stick it in the dishwasher.
No child support here either, Jann. Men are such flakes…
Such lively conversation, all sparked by talk of loading a dishwasher. That’s awesome. I am impressed by such a simple thing. :) But I still hate washing/loading/unloading the dishes. Soul-sucking work, it is.
I get what Meagan is saying about the laundry, too. I haaaaate folding the laundry, but I’d rather do that than wash dishes. It is a comfort thing, I think. I don’t like having my hands stuck in a pan of greasy/soapy water for 20-45 minutes. The constant wet feeling irritates my senses. Maybe it is the tunnel vision, too. Unless you’re fortunate to have a window with a view above the sink, it’s just staring at the wall for a long time. Long, in that 20 minutes can seem like an eternity while scrubbing the dish. Space-time is calculated differently for dish washers.
I always wear rubber gloves while washing dishes.
When I was five years old, my mother was ill and spent a couple of days in the hospital. We lived in Idaho, and our relatives were all on the east coast, so my father had to take over household chores for a few days. He (apparently) hated washing dishes so much that he decided to surprise my mother with a dishwasher. When the dishwasher arrived, my mother told the men who had come to install it that she didn’t want it, and sent it back to the store.
I just talked to my mother about this today, and there is another part to the story that I didn’t remember. My mother said that after that, we all went to a department store to look at dishwashers, at my father’s insistance, although he did not usually wash dishes. We were looking at one that had a glass window and was running at the time. The salesman was explaining that if the door was openend while the dishwasher was running, it would immediately shut down and no water would escape. My four year old sister grabbed the door and opened it, and water sprayed out all over us and some nearby furniture the store was trying to sell. That ended the quest for a dishwasher, that is if you define dishwasher as a “man made object.” (I taught my grandson how to play “twenty questions” while we were in Hawaii recently).
Bran – I was just being amazed shortly before I read your comment about how many comments we were getting out of a seemingly innocent chronology that mentioned washing dishes. :) I have a window above the sink, but since the window faces west we’ve hung a blanket over it in an effort to keep the house from getting too much about 80 degrees during the summer. I’ve started making my six-year-old help with laundry folding, but I’d almost rather do it myself than listen to him whine the whole time.
Jann – Your sister sounds a lot like me… always has to test things! That’s exactly what I would have done. “Really!? Let’s see…”