At the risk of boring you …

Yup, it’s about the dishes again. Hopefully this pitiful saga is reaching a resolution. The Professor swore he was going to be better about the dishes after the shattered plates incident. I know I’m ruining the surprise ending by saying this, but like a fool I took him at his word.

Last night I made fish for dinner. Fish, butternut squash and salads. But fish is the important part of the story. After dinner I moved all the dishes to the sink. The pan I cooked the fish in is too large for the sink, though, so I put it on the counter by the sink. I then wandered off to color my hair and take care of a couple things around the apartment.

About an hour and a half later I was sitting at my computer terminal when I heard a clatter from the kitchen, followed by a resounding thump. I *knew* what it had to be, and dashed over there just in time to see the Warrior Princess slink furtively away (I never realized cats could slink so low with their tails between their legs). Upon investigation, I found that the fish pan had been wiped pretty damned clean of all residue.

So I washed the dishes. All of them. The Prof must have known what I was doing, but stayed so far out of the kitchen (probably in fear of my wrath) that he was practically in the next state. Shortly before 8:00 I could hear him setting up the television; we had planned to watch “Enterprise” last night. When the program started I still had a pot and the fish pan to wash.

I joined him in the living room during the first set of commercials. Again, his immediate concern was which cat had been on the counters. When informed it was his cat, he started to grab the spritzer bottle to scold her with. I stopped him. Almost three quarters of an hour had passed, and you can’t scold an animal if it has no idea what it’s done wrong. WP has the typical cat short-term-memory problem, and would have had no clue as to why retribution would have been descending upon her if The Prof had punished her at that point.

Then The Prof uttered those fateful words: “I can’t believe that something like washing the dishes has gotten to be such an issue.” “Well yeah, I can’t believe it either,” I told him. I informed him that since the situation has gotten so blown out of proportion, I was fixing it. From this point forward I was doing the dishes, immediately after dinner. The Prof was, from here on out, relieved of any and all responsibilities in the kitchen. I wanted things done my way, so I was going to do them my way.

The Prof observed that he never saw why the dishes had to be washed before they were needed again, but now that the cats had discovered the used dishware there was now a reason to do the dishes after dinner. I observed that there was always a reason to do the dishes after dinner, even if he didn’t see it.

He started feeling fairly guilty at this point (he’s fairly good at putting off feeling guilty until he’s run out of other things to blame). He said that he could start putting the dishes in the dishwasher to keep the cats from them. I said that was a good idea, and that I’d probably be using the dishwasher for anything I could, but that the dishes would still be done immediately.

Next commercial break The Prof tells me that he doesn’t like my solution. He feels like he needs to do his share of the household chores. I told him he was welcome to do anything else in the house, but I was doing the dishes. All he needed was to be reminded, he said, and he’d do them. My response to that was that I didn’t feel like reminding somebody who was going to get sour and surly when I did so. It was unpleasant for me, and I wasn’t going to do it. “But I don’t like doing the dishes,” was his defense. “Great,” I said, “you don’t have to do them anymore, do you?”

Next commercial break comes. He wants me to give him one more chance. He’ll do the dishes after dinner. He won’t get sulky if I have to remind him. He can’t promise he won’t need reminding at first, but he’ll do them. I relent and tell him we can try it that way one last time. What I didn’t tell him was how I planned to remind him.

His reminder will be seeing me do the dishes if he doesn’t do them. And that’s an end to it.