I'm not your Mother...

So, this post is my rant about roommates not doing dishes. Anyone who has lived with me from the time I got home from my mission can attest that there isn't much that makes me more unhappy than a pile of dishes in the sink. It has even gone so far as me posting threatening nots and placing roommates on my black list. It probably has to do a lot with the environment in my home, where my mom always tried to make sure that the areas on the main level of our house were presentable so that they were ready at any moment for visitors.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I am not the cleanest person there is, and picture of the current state of my bedroom would prove that point well. I have never for the life of me been able to keep a desk clean for more than a week. But there is a difference between having piles of paper on a desk and piles of dishes in a sink. First off, papers don't rot and smell bad for the rest of your roommates. Secondly, very few people besides myself ever enter my bedroom, while our kitchen could often be used to entertain guests.

The last 2 years have been particularly bad when it comes to roommates who don't do dishes. Part of this is because the last two years I have had to live with a couple randomly assigned roommates, so that it was hard to discuss the problem with them. When I moved to my current apartment with Lamar and Pilgram, we all decided to go to the use only one plate system to avoid the dish problems that plagued our apartment last year. Alas, our new roommate (who is 31 and should know better) leaves dishes in the sink for WEEKS!!! Look, I can understand that sometimes you have to eat and run, or you need to soak the pan in water for a bit to get the stuff that you burned onto it out, but after 24 hours, if you haven't washed the dish it is only because you are lazy. The thing that irks me the most is when someone uses one of my pans and then doesn't wash it, so that it is dirty when I want to use it.

As you can probably tell from the post, this rant is inspired from a fresh bout. I spent an hour tonight cleaning the kitchen, and when I walk in there now there is MY pizza pan lying unwashed in the sink. Seriously, you can't take a 30 second break from watching your cartoons to wash off the pizza pan you used?!?! Our sink is never without a dish in it for more than a few hours in this apartment, and we all know who the culprit is, since 3 of us only use 1 set of dishes each and don't rely on the dishwasher. I actually got to the point where I threw away a bowl that sat on the counter for 2 weeks with pasta in it. I figure, if you aren't using it for 2 weeks, you won't miss it if I throw it away. Maybe I am a bad person, but you have to learn to do dishes sooner or later...

Google Buzz

Maybe I am just doing this wrong, or maybe nobody I "follow" ever does anything, but I am confused about this whole Google Buzz thing. The only time it ever tells me anything is when I post something. I know when I have updated my blog, or posted a video on youtube, I don't need a new tool to tell me that. It would be nice if it would tell me when the people I am following do something, but so far it hasn't. Murt posts on his blog for the first time in 2 months and not a notice. But when I put this blog post up, Google buzz will let me know.

In a related note, I recently discovered the Labs section in gmail. There is a lot of stuff on there that I could use to potentially make my google experience better. The one I chose to enable: when I push the "&" when I am on my gmail homepage, it brings up the classic snake game for me to play. Useful? Probably not. Hours of entertainment when I should be working on my thesis? Definitely. Thank you google labs, for giving me something to do instead of being productive.