Doing Dishes Ruined Our Life

Our rental house doesn’t have a dishwasher. This was a huge letdown when we walked into the place the first time and looked around (and yes, this walk-through happened after we committed to living there for four months). I seriously looked around the (tiny) kitchen a few times thinking it had to be hidden somewhere. I understand there are many people out there who don’t have a dishwasher, but this is an appliance that I strongly believe is one of the best technological innovations ever developed. However, I took our not having a dishwasher in stride, thinking, well, we wash Sully’s bottles by hand a couple nights a week, and we wash our knives and pots and pans by hand, so how bad will having to wash all of our dishes by hand be, really?

It’s really bad. Sucks, actually.

So bad that Gabe is going to the store tonight to get paper plates and keg cups for us to use until we move into our new house that has a dishwasher. The need to do multiple dishes has been affecting what we decide to make (or not make, as the case may be) for dinner every night. It takes a HUGE chunk out of our evening, so – while our commutes our now 100 times better than in Seattle – we still don’t get to settle down for the evening until after 9 PM or later, and I don’t want to go straight from doing house chores to going to bed. That’s just depressing. So, that means we don’t go to bed until near 11 PM each night after watching TV a bit, maybe reading a bit. By the end of the week, we’re wiped out and just want to sleep to get ready to do it all over again the following week. Ick.

So, we’re becoming environmentally unfriendly and using disposable plates and cups for the next couple of months. Oh, and don’t EVEN get me started on the stupid, ridiculous, archaic and asinine system that Minneapolis calls their recycling program. This system is circa 1979, I swear.

For being a fairly progressive, urban area, they require a shitload of separating, bundling, tying and cleaning to happen to the recyclables. And the recycling containers are the size of a laundry basket. They want us to put TWO WEEKS worth of recyclables in a laundry basket?! Are you kidding me? And we can’t recycle any of our packing paper from the move unless we go ahead and uncrumple, flatten and neatly place it in a paper bag that only is holding paper. Um, yeah. That isn’t going to happen. We’ve put three garbage bags of paper alone in the garbage. We’re going to eco-hell.