Nothing Wrong

28^th January 2015

Dear Cassi,

There was nothing wrong with my dishwasher. Pickle has simply failed to clean his plates before putting them in the sink and so had clogged a tube under the sink. It cost me ninety five dollars to learn that and a hundred and seventy two to get my dryer to stop chirping.

Pickle did not pay for any of that, but then I guess not hearing him complain about it was enough to keep me quiet. I tell the man over and over not to put food in the sink, scrape your plate over the trash, don’t let food dry till it’s hard, but he never listens.

Normal people, Cassi, clean when cleaning is needed, wash dishes after they use them, and can fold their own towels. I was not brought up as a normal person so these things are hard for me. However, Pickle has all the time he needs to do whatever he wishes and so could do a fair job at cleaning these things.

There are times in my life that I feel as if I’m not human. As if I’m an experiment in trying to be human. It is as if I am the retype of some other manufacture’s trying to make a copy of someone else’s product. This is me, the Neal 3, third experiment where we tried to figure out what makes a human work.

Now I think I know why my mother wanted four children. She was thinking that number four would have been the one she got right.

Keep to the right, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal

Live Clean

27^th January 2015

Dear Cassi,

My dishwasher has been out of order and I have so been washing my dishes by hand until the repairman comes tomorrow. This has made its largest impact on my smoothies which I make often. A blender is one thing they didn’t have back in the day. As best I can tell, the blender was first patented in 1922 and the first home dishwasher in 1924. This is to say that blenders are commonly washed in a dishwasher.

This is because, at least to me, getting the dang things clean is hard work, and you can never be sure you got them properly disinfected. The heat of a modern dishwasher deals with that nicely. This is not to say that my blender jars are always clean when coming out of the dishwasher, but I am confident in them being disinfected.

I have six blender jars and they’re all dirty. Most have water in them to prevent the goo from drying and making them hard to clean. I have not had this many blender jars dirty since I took over the bulk of the dishwashing.

As I’ve mentioned, I make my smoothies with red wine to cure them, and this may kill the bacteria, but I’m not sure. I never use milk as Pickle is lactose intolerant, but I do use yogurt. The vast majority of certain nutrients in my diet come from smoothies. It’s where I use all my blueberries.

Tomorrow the washer will be fixed and then I’ll likely wash every blender jar at once just to be sure they are all clean. That goes the same for the silver where, colanders, and the cutting boards.

Live clean, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal