Mountain O-Dishes

It's interesting how quickly dishes can pile up when you neglect to do them! Tonight we had Kevan and Leah over for coffee & cards after a failed attempt at watching a movie (see Duane's Rants of Reason for more details on that!) and when they left, it was decided that we needed to do dishes. Sometimes when I do dishes by myself I make a game out of seeing just how well I can stack all the clean dishes in our dish-rack so I don't have to dry them. It really is a work of art. Karyn says that her sister Jody is the queen of stacking dishes but, as you can see, I could be a contender in the family for the same skill (though I'd rather not be known as the "queen of dish stacking" for obvious reasons!).This pile consists of almost all of the dirty dishes we had. What I could not include due to an obvious lack of room on the stack was the cutting board, a cookie sheet, a soup ladle, and a spatula.

The key to dish stacking is to plan out your wash to get the best base possible. First, I like to get the cutlery out of the way and then move on to the plates & bowls. Once in their place you can fill in the rest of the available space with cups & mugs. Covering the solid base you need to start packing on the volume items such as pots & pans and your tupperware. It's a toss-up as to which you stack on top of the other and there's some trade-offs to each. If you stack pots & pans first and then tupperware you have your weight on the bottom and things are going to be pretty stable until you get to the top (with the tupperware). If you go tupperware first and then pots & pans you have some weight to hold the tupperware in place but there's a higher risk of the lot falling down under the weight if not properly distributed.

My analysis of this post leads me to two conclusions:

1. We need a dishwasher to prevent our dishes from piling up like this
2. I need to get a life or at least start posting about more interesting things!

D