The Kitchen Sink Science Fair: Bringing Medieval Plagues to the 21st Century

We have a cyclical relationship with filth. Sometimes, we're on top and everything is clean and you could imagine yourself eating here quite happily, and other times we're lying around in lazy defeat and then you wouldn't want to come in the door. I wish that it weren't like this, but... alas, it is. Our personalities, so pleasantly compatible in other ways, combine to produce some glaringly dysfunctional cleaning.

Just a little preface there for before you judge. It's not always like this.

I did the vast majority of the dishes this morning. There were a few things that wouldn't fit in the dishwasher or else needed soaking time, so they're waiting in the sink. But everything is well on its way to cleanliness.

There was an alarming amount of mold growing among the lower strata of dirty kitchen ware. If I'm saying it was alarming, you know that it had to be bad. The "perfect storm" of food waste. Forms of dirty-plate-mold that I've encountered often enough to no longer feel alarmed by include: the little black gritty things that look like tiny sand and slough right off, the slick film, the spiderwebby kind that hangs on a bit more tightly, and the hard nucleus of crust that you have to scrub the bejesus out of before it will budge. Today's specimen blended black grit with slick film and a virulent stink that combined food and rot odors so perfectly that I don't know when I'll be able to smell eggs again without visualizing slick film.

I'm not so good with the odors. I can get used to visuals, but there's no preparing for a disgusting smell.

The important thing is that it's clean now.