Dry Cabin Cronicles: Washing the Dishes

As you all know by now, we are living in a dry cabin. The past week and a half has been somewhat easy. I am surprised at how smoothly we have transitioned into this lifestyle. There are many things we still need to figure out, but we're getting the hang of it! I'm actually quite proud of us!

So here's how dish washing works (so far - I'm sure we'll learn new tricks as we go). We have three, seven-gallon water jugs that we collect our water in. They sit on the counter and have a faucet like spout that leans over the sink. This is our faucet. It runs with room temperature water, though, so dish washing requires some finesse.

The main thing about dish washing is to stay on top of the dishes. No more sink-full-of-dishes-from-the-week-to-be-tackled-on-Sunday for us! We must wash the dishes after we are done, or everything crusts up and we don't have additional water for soaking the tough stuff. To wash the dishes, I fill a bowl with water and heat it up in the microwave for a minute. Then I add some biodegradable dish soap and make it sudsy with the sponge. This is my washing soap, and it works exceptionally well! It makes the dishes wet and soapy - I just dip the sponge in the bowl and voila! No need to run the water over each dish first! Actually, I learned this technique from my friend Deanna when we lived in Argentina together. She had spent a couple of years living in Jordan where water was scarce. This was how they washed dishes there. So she had developed the habit of washing dishes this way. And then I began using it until my trusty sudsy bowl broke and I never replaced it. Anyway, now I'm back at it and it works really well. Once all the dishes are washed, then I rinse. We use the coffee pot to make hot rinsing water. As you pour over one dish, the others get some water too. I can easily do a load of dishes with just the sudsy water and the 12 cups from the coffee pot!

And on that note, I'm off to do a load of dishes!