Don't Tell Mom the Maid's Dead

"The dishes are done, man!"

I stayed up till midnight last night to do dishes. I had already taken down the Christmas tree and balanced the boxes artfully in a Dr. Seuss-esque tower in the garage. I was on a roll and figured I'd keep on keepin' on, though I didn't get more than 5 minutes of post-work downtime. Booo.

However, one of my Home Ec resolutions is to no longer go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink. It's ten times grosser to clean up the next day, it hits me with Catholic guilt first thing in the morning (not healthy for my psyche), and a shining sink at bedtime is a major best practice in Marthaworld. The task (and its lateness) was unpleasant, but came with many rewards the next day and I felt as if I had made some progress on my quest.

So what did I use to green-clean my dishes?


Of course, paper towels are out of the question (an abomination in the green world). Crocheted dish rags are good, but the ones I have used so far (purchased from the Sugar Plum Tree Senior Citizens Craft Fair, a southern senior ladies annual event in Virginia Beach) have retained some unappealing stains and I'm not fond of doing laundry. I'd like to crochet my own, but my three-year-old son won't let me. Maybe some midnight stitching is in order. I'll have to teach myself how again - been a while.

I used to be an advocate of sponges, but mine don't ever seem to get as clean as people say they are supposed to when I attempt to purge them of skunk in the dishwasher or microwave, and my roommate always tosses mine out when I'm not looking. She has a rather mundane plastic dish brush, which I thought would be ineffective at first glance, but it turns out these sleepers are stellar at maintaining the suds and exceptionally talented at removing crusty dinner remains from dishes and pots. Who knew?

So I'm very happy with the dish brush outside of the sometime difficulty of getting the food off the brush itself without spraying my face with dish-brush gunk. I'll have to practice with that - maybe a plastic hair comb for cleaning. Anyway...I am converted for the moment, and am off to find a bamboo handled dish brush to increase the eco-friendliness of my chosen scrubbing instrument. I saw some nice ones at Green Depot today.

My new mantra: Bring back home ec!