Beware What You Wish For...

First, a round of applause for my devoted husband. Larry woke up early this morning just to install our brand-new used dishwasher as a surprise for me. I came downstairs to the sweet sound of its gurgling rinse cycle. Yes, I had doubted him. But I am willing to eat crow on this one, since I don't have to wash the dirty plate by hand.

It was a beautiful, hope-filled morning. I danced around the kitchen like Snow White cleaning up after the seven dwarfs. I loaded the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. I loaded the lunch dishes, too. While the dishwasher ran through its cycle, I emptied out my refrigerator and cleaned all the shelves, happy in the knowledge that all the nasty-smelling storage dishes I unearthed would be washed later in my marvelous machine. I took down my beautiful dish-drying rack and stowed it under the sink. I scrubbed its drip pan and stowed that, too. Hello, 21st-century!

But wait! Was that a puddle forming in front of my newly-acquired appliance? No matter, I thought. Larry would just need to tighten a hose. As I began to put my machine-cleaned dishes away, I noticed detergent residue on them. Whoops. I put them back in the dishwasher, to rewash after Larry gets around to fixing things. But there were all those dirty Pyrex containers piled on the counter....

I didn't have the heart to pull my Michael Graves dish drainer back out of the cabinet. Later, I washed and dried the dinner dishes by hand, ignoring all the dirty storage dishes. "I'll do those after Bunko," I lied to Larry.

So now I have dirty dishes in the leaky dishwasher, a non-working dishwasher sitting in my dining room, and a mountain of Pyrex in the sink.

But, hey - my fridge is clean.