Better Food, Cleaner Dishes and No Spiders

We sort of have this thing about appliances around here.  Way back at the very dawning of this blog I wrote a post about our hunt for, and purchase of, a washing machine.  It tells the tale of our complete ignorance and relative incompetence when it comes to making an educated purchase of such contraptions.

But it's not the issue of having to choose one that keeps us from buying a dishwasher or microwave.  Money isn't the problem, either (because we have bags of money in the basement waiting for us to decide what to spend it on)  (don't tell the neighbors).  No, we are just prejudiced against these appliances.

I don't like food out of the microwave.  As a little girl my best friend had a microwave WAY before the rest of the world did and we would stick a piece of Wonder bread in there and relish each bite of the steaming, rubbery, food-like substance that came out 15 seconds later.  But I seem to have outgrown rubbery food and become a disliker of slimy cheese.

I like my cheese crispy.  I like my hot-dogs browned (and un-exploded).  I like my frozen dinners -- I don't like my frozen dinners.  Everything a microwave can do, a stove-top or oven can do better, in my opinion (except soften butter).  So we haven't had a microwave for 11 years.

Greg is strongly averse to dishwashers.  "They don't work well", he says.  "They're not worth the trouble" he says.  And I take his word for it about not being worth the trouble because he's something of an expert, since he washes about !% of the dirty dishes around here.  So, we don't have a dishwasher (actually we do in the downstairs kitchen but we've never used it).

We also don't have a drier, but that's more for reasons of nobody-in-Europe-has-a-drier.  Plus 11 years of not using one has made me a little afraid of them (although I miss them dearly at the same time).

In conclusion, the other morning Evie came into my room and told me there was a spider.  I stepped out of my bedroom and found this waiting to jump down on the next person who dared descend the stairs below him:

For comparison, the light underneath is about as long as my humerus.  (I always give measurements in bone lengths)  (especially while talking about spider size around Halloween)  This guy was definitely bigger than my patella.  (glad he never got anywhere near my patella, though, let me tell you!)

It was no problem though, because Greg came out and sucked him up with the vacuum.  Because we HAVE a vacuum.  We are, in fact, firm believers in the vacuum cleaner.