Dishwasher

I've been washing my dishes by hand for more than sixteen years now. At first I didn't mind it too much, but as the years have gone by I've increasingly soured on this particular chore. Part of it was that whenever we visited someone else, everyone and their mother seemed to have a dishwasher, reminding me of what I'd left behind. However, the bigger part of my frustration was probably that my husband developed chronic back pain and (justifiably) noped out of doing the dishes ever again, leaving it to me at all times, even when he was on holiday and I was working - meaning I still had to also do the dishes at the end of a tiring work day, and I hated it.

I started talking about getting a dishwasher and was always shot down with the argument that "the landlords would never agree to getting the plumbing for that in", which was probably true, but I couldn't help being wistful about it.

The other day I was watching a Technology Connections video about dishwashers (I don't remember which one - he's made several!), and in it he said something along the lines of (paraphrased): "I don't know what some of you have against dishwashers, my grandma hated doing the dishes so much, she had a dishwasher on wheels that she'd wheel into the kitchen every night just to avoid doing dishes herself." To which my reaction was: There are dishwashers on wheels?

I couldn't find one of those in the UK, but Amazon had a selection of "portable" dishwashers - little larger than a microwave, but no plumbing required. I decided that my time had come and bought one.

Unpacking and trying it out was a bit unnerving at first (Did we secure that outlet pipe well enough or are we going to be swimming in five litres of water shortly?) but once we'd had confirmation that everything was in order, it was an absolute delight to use it for the first time. I looked through the little window to observe the spraying arm action with so much awe, I must have looked like a kid in front of a Christmas tree. The husband was a bit weirded out by my excitement, but I look forward to no longer having to spend hours and hours of my life scraping dried food residue off dirty plates!