Dish Pan Hands

Eight years ago, when we moved into our first apartment with a dishwasher, we vowed that we wouldn't use the dishwasher because it would save electricity. We'd done dishes by hand for three years before that, it wouldn't hurt us to keep doing them by hand, right? Then I had a bridal shower and we had a wedding... We got fifteen place settings of everyday dishes with four pieces in each set and sixteen new glasses and sixteen place settings of silverware and a new Tupperware set and new pans and....

You get the point.... It all had to be washed and put away and I wasn't about to do it by hand when I had a perfectly good dishwasher sitting there. That was the end of THAT idea! We started using our dishwasher and honestly, I don't recall that it made a huge difference in our electric bill.

A year and a half later we moved to our current home, which also came equipped with a dishwasher. We didn't even pretend we weren't going to use THIS dishwasher! We use it all the time, washing only larger items like pans and fragile items like wine glasses by hand. We're SO spoiled!

And then it happened... I opened the dishwasher Sunday afternoon and there, in the bottom of the dishwasher, was three inches of standing water and all of my dishes were covered with bubbles. My parents came over for dinner that evening, and even my handy dad couldn't fix it. BOO! So dad and I washed all of the dinner dishes by hand and then washed all of the once-washed-but-never-rinsed dishes from the dishwasher by hand. GOOD TIMES!

While washing dishes by hand is somewhat relaxing, and one could argue that soaking one's hand in warm water while washing is a tad bit like having a manicure, the aftermath is excruciatingly painful for someone who was recently 'diagnosed' with eczema caused by too much water on my hands!

UGH! Dish pan hands SUCK! Oh... And no more manicures for me!