52 Changes - Everything that goes with it!

If you’re like me (i.e. you have a soul), you love Disney movies.  Particularly the string of them that had good stories, great songs you just love to sing along with, and classic beautiful animation.  I’m talking to you, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King, Pocahontas and Mulan.  And even though you’re not Disney, much much love for Anastasia.  But the undisputed greatness of these movies isn’t the point of today’s post, though I have no doubt I could talk about that for a long time.

No, today I was inspired by a scene from Aladdin, which isn’t even my favorite of those listed above, and which I haven’t seen in ages anyway.  Near the end of the film (Spoiler alert!  As if you haven’t seen Aladdin before…), Jafar uses his final wish to become a genie, matching the power of the loveable blue genie but without the corny jokes.  As he lets loose his evil laugh, Jafar is suddenly reminded by Aladdin of something.

“Not so fast, Jafar!  Aren’t you forgetting something?  You wanna be a genie, you got it!  And everything that goes with it!”

Jafar is sucked into the lamp, subject to the rules of genie-dom that he only be allowed out to grant wishes for others.  Hooray!  Aladdin and Jasmine marry, Jafar is cast away somewhere and all ends happily.  Now, what, you might think, does this have to do with anything?

Well, for quite some time, I’ve been acting like Jafar in the last moments before he’s sucked into the lamp.  I want to cook, I like doing that, just as Jafar likes, umm… zapping things with his fingertips?  I don’t remember exactly.  But anyway, I didn’t want to do the everything that goes with it, namely, the damn dishes.

To be honest, I kinda hate doing dishes.  I think everyone does, unless they’re deluding themselves.  I always procrastinated and tried to weasel my way out of it at home, waiting until the moment that I absolutely had to do it, and then only grudgingly.  Well, once I was living in my own place, you can imagine how eager I was to wash dishes promptly.  So things started to pile up.  Couple that with the tiny kitchen we had in Ames, and the not-so-much-bigger one we now have in West Des Moines, and you have a case of magically vanishing counterspace.  (Side note, next time we buy a house, item 1 on my list is size of the kitchen.  Why I keep liking places with tiny kitchens is seriously beyond me).

So you get things (dirty dishes, used kitchen appliances, cutting boards, pots and pans, etc.) piling up on the already cramped counters, and it becomes a real challenge to cook dinner the next day.  We’ve become fairly adept at preparing food in very limited quarters, which I guess would be good if we move to a submarine or something, but it’s really not ideal.  Sometimes it’s sufficiently frustrating that we just decide to order a pizza or go out, but on other occasions it just makes the cooking experience less fun, which is a real bummer.

The solution, as much as I don’t like it, is to force myself to wash dishes.  Duh, right?  Well, I haven’t been doing it, and it does need to get done, regularly.  Therefore, this week’s change is to create a rotation of kitchen chores that need to be completed every other day.  Right now the rotation is hand dishes one day, dishwasher the next, and (just to space things out since they don’t accumulate that quickly) do laundry the third day.  Repeat twice a week, one day off for the expected random day where we’re just to lazy/busy to get any one of these done, and we’ve got ourselves a goal.

Hopefully this will lead to a cleaner kitchen overall, which not only makes cooking more fun, but is also better for food safety, now that I think about it.  If I come up with another kitchen task to throw into the mix, we can boot laundry to a separate timetable, but for now I think this will work.

Three weeks in, zero snoozes, most days featuring some relaxation/decompressing after work, and we’ve meal planned for the upcoming week as well.  So far, so good!