Your Intestinal Health

When I grew up, neither myself nor my brother were expected to do any household chores. Perhaps in the beginning my parents had hopes that Steve and I would help out around the house, but I suppose our efforts just didn’t meet my mom’s standards. I gave housework very little thought and just so long as all of my needs were met I had no complaints.

Mom always did the dishes in the single sink that we had, drying them right away. There were people who had double sinks, but I had always figured that the second sink would take the place of a drying rack. This is all that I knew until I moved in with Louise. We had a double kitchen sink and I was informed that the second sink was to rinse the soap off of the dishes. Hmmm…makes sense. That is the way that I wash dishes now, the one sink filled with soapy water and the second filled with very hot, clean water for the rinse, and then into the rack to dry. I rarely towel dry the dishes, mainly out of laziness rather than a well thought out reason.

I do most of the dishes because I learned early on that if you wanted some alone time, the best way to get it was to do the dishes. Even when someone offers to help, they don’t really want to help, they are just being nice. There is also the fact that other people don’t do the same job that you would like them to do. I always rinse the dishes first, before they go into the soapy water. I don’t like the idea of dirty dishes going into my nice clean wash water. Yes, I am aware that it is just a trifle anal, but the idea of small hunks of food floating in the water that I am trying to clean dishes in, just does not make sense. One of my many idiosyncrasies I guess.

When Brendan was in Scouts, the way they would do dishes is to have one tub of soapy water and a tub of clean water with a touch of bleach to rinse and sterilize the dishes before they were dried. The Scouts were the ones that did the dishes and frankly, they didn’t really give a shit abut how clean the dishes got. Some of these kids didn’t even scrape the plates clean before dumping them in the soapy water. They would never pour out the water and replace it because it involved heating more water on the stove and the kids washing wanted to get to play sooner rather than later. I tried to get a third tub filled with water just to rinse the lumps off of the plates, but I was never listened to. Bastards! I managed to get through all of those weekends without any serious bouts of food poisoning, but I attribute that to keeping a keen eye on the plate that I put my food on.

I remember reading in Popular Science years ago that in the future (now) the people will spray a plastic coating on the plates before eating and after the meal we would just have to strip the coating off and put the plates away. I think it’s a good idea, but knowing myself, I imagine I would rinse the plates before I strip off the plastic coating. You can’t be too careful when your intestinal health is concerned.