the Folly of Laundry and the beauty of dishes.

Here is my reply ladies. Read it and weep. It’s late, so just chalk all the typos up to bleary eyes and a tired mind… but I think I get the point across. Tawna, I love you… but dishes totally wins out. ;-) We may just be able to agree to disagree… but I might yet win a new convert.

No one really truly enjoys doing chores. Be it cleaning the house, taking out the trash, cleaning one’s room, doing the laundry, or even the dishes… there is always a certain amount of distaste for such work. This is to be understood, in a world of instant gratification people always desire to do what they want to do at the moment that they choose. Chores cause people to delay their plans for bigger and better things. With this in mind, I have to say that of all the house hold chores develop character and a sense of delaying what we want now for what needs to be done. This said, doing the Laundry is one of the worst. It demands time! (and a strong nose) First you have to sort your stinky smelly laundry into piles, (taking one pile and creating multiple smelly piles that each have to be dealt with in turn…) and it’s been what? Two, three weeks since you dropped in that pair of workout shorts that reeked when you dropped them in? Give them 2 weeks to ripen and let me tell you… you’re gunna need a close pin! Nobody likes that smell, and I mean no one. Of course you want to optimize your time, so you wait to do laundry to get a full load. Then come to find out that you waited too long and you can’t even fit what you wanted to in the washer. So either you pay for another machine (college students) or you have to wait even longer to do a second load of the same color when you have several other loads that need to be done anyways. Then you have 35-50 minutes before you have to be back to change the loads and put the now wet clothes in the dryer. Talk about inefficient and annoying. How about they make a washer dryer combo so you don’t have to drag out a bunch of wet clothes getting yourself all wet. (and inevitably dropping a sock or two on your ‘clean’ floor.) Once again you are waiting. Another 45 minutes to an hour waiting while the drying does its business. Are you done then? Nope! You now get to sit down and fold the plethora of clothes that then have to put away upstairs in their proper drawers. That’s what…. 2 hours for a load of laundry? Sure you feel good that you now have clean clothes to wear that smell nice and come out of the dryer all warm, (which only feels good in winter) but is it really worth the aggravation and time? I’m not even going to mention the hassle for most of the world who don’t even have the comfort of a washer or dryer. Don’t even get me started!

Now take a much more pleasant and enjoyable task, one like… oh I don’t know… of say doing the dishes! Of course some people are going to disagree, but cleaning the dishes is a therapeutic, aromatic, and self-satisfying endeavor. Yes it’s frustrating when you get home to see a kitchen full of dirty dishes that you didn’t dirty, and yes the kitchen always looks like a bomb shell went off when there are dirty dishes lying around. No one likes dirty dishes cluttering the house. So what do you do? You go change out of your nice clothes, dropping them in the dirty hamper which you haven’t even thought of because it’s only half full, and set out to clean the kitchen. You start with a dirty disaster that just makes you feel upset. Yet as you clean piece by piece… It’s like cleaning your attitude or washing to upsetting part of your day away. You get a satisfaction out of cleaning each plate and placing it in the dishwasher. Taking a smudged plate and making it look as good as new… there is something very satisfactory about that. You feel better once the dishwasher is loaded a running. You then set out to take care of the pots and pans. A little bit of soap and water some therapeutic scrubbing of the pans and the very satisfactory knowledge that that pan is Clean! You can dry them and put them away, wash the counters down… take a step back and look at what you have created, a beautiful kitchen just waiting to be used to make macaroni and cheese, a fig tart, or even chicken pillows. You feel GOOD with a sense of accomplishment. Your day is brighter, why? Because the kitchen is clean and how long did it take you? 20 minutes, 30 Tops. A little bit of physical work to clear out the negative of the day, a beautiful clean kitchen that just feels good, and it took a quarter of the time it takes to do one load of laundry.

Explaining siphoning to a 5 year old

So, I was asked a question the other day about how a siphon works... Of course my mind starting thinking of words like hydrostatic pressure, gravity, and intermolecular forces. I was also told that I had to start at the beginning and explain as if I were talking to a 5 year old. Ok, so he or she is a very inquisitive and smart 5 year old... but a 5 year old none the less.

With that premise in mind, let me see what I can do.

Siphoning is really a principle of gravity. Which is what causes us to stick to the earth, and fall when we jump. I can't think of any other better explainable than that of a train. Let's picture a train going up a hill. It get's to the top of the hill and then starts down the other side. At any time it could turn off it's engine, and because the bulk of it's cargo is still on the downhill side, the train would begin to roll backwards. As it gets farther and farther over the hill, it comes to a point where even it turned off it's engine, it continue to roll forwards down the other side of the hill, even when some of the train still has to travel up the hill, there is enough weight on the other side that it will pull the rest of the train over. Now let's think of water as the train as it travels through a pipe. It's connected, just as the train is, not by metal connectors but by physical attractions between water molecules. When enough of the water is through the tube and down the 'other side' it will begin to pull the rest of the water through the pipe just as the train would pull the rest of it's cargo over and down the hill. So long as the water exiting the pipe is lower than the other side of the pipe where the water enters, gravity will pull the connected 'train' of water through the pipe.

Ok, so it's as simple as I could make it... but I'm still not sure a 5 year old would get the whole idea. Let me know what you think.

First comes first

SO... it's now time to blog and we shall see what happens.

and Tawna is reading my blog, and I love her. ;-)