Doing the dishes

I believe it was February. The cherry trees had started to bloom and there were daffodils risking the frost. I don't think midterm season had quite started. I googled "How to do the dishes." Because clearly I did not know. I knew that you put the dishes in the dishwasher, filled the soap, and ran the dishwasher. Or filled the sink with water and washed each dish, rinsed it, and put it in the drying rack, to be put away later. But I clearly had missed something, because there was always a massive dish pile. I knew part of it was that my fiancee has chronic pain and couldn't help me. Also I was very busy. I have a lot of anxiety and dishes stress me out. I didn't understand how people had time to do the dishes every day, because it takes about an hour. I knew I just needed to devote that hour to dishes, but how could I do all the other things around the house when I spent an hour just washing dishes?

In my google search I found an article from the blog "A Slob Comes Clean." She talked about why she needed to run her dishwasher every night. I knew you needed to, but I couldn't figure out why. So I started listening to her blog. I also started running the dishwasher every night. For a while it was incredibly painful. I hated doing it. But I did it. And I still am. And she is right. Because it doesn't take an hour to deal with dishes. It takes five minutes to load, five minutes to unload, at the most. If we run it multiple times because we've cooked a bunch, that's only another 10 minutes. It doesn't take an hour.

And even better now that the dishes are done all the time my fiancee can help out, even with the chronic pain, because 5 minutes is much more manageable then an hour.

And our house is cleaner. We have both taken up new hobbies. Today after breakfast I did my daily martial arts practice. I have the time now; the dishes are done.