Hobby is doing dishes

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Sorry I haven’t posted here in a while.

A recent discussion of cleaning and chores brought this to mind:

Peter was not, in my memory, the cleanest/neatest person ever, but he was certainly less messy/cluttered than I am.

Most of the time, when I was a kid, he didn’t seem to notice the clutter. But every once in a while, he would suddenly decide that the house (or at least my room) needed cleaning. He always said the same thing about it: “This place is a pigsty!”

A while after Marcy died, when Peter began looking for a partner again, he placed an ad in the newspaper that started out “Hobby is doing dishes.” He figured that would get women’s attention. Jay asked him something like, “If doing dishes is your hobby, how come Jed and I have to do them so often?” Peter replied, “I like my hobby so much that I want to share it.”

I think he worked for a while as a janitor (at a nursing home, maybe?) when I was a kid. Later, when he and Nancy were living in Tacoma, I got the impression that he basically did all the cleaning chores around the house. As far as I could tell, he was perfectly happy with that arrangement, and he kept the place pretty clean.

One Response to “Hobby is doing dishes”

  1. Dobe

    Peter washed dishes for a living when he lived south of Tacoma (Lakewood?); I went with him one day to pick up a paycheck or something.

    I remember Brother Peter explicitly telling me, perhaps several to many times, that he “enjoyed” janitorial work, cleaning, washing dishes, etc.

    He was often successful in finding employment in what he liked to do, (although I think he “cheated” and used the low-attention required to think about Everything… and Nothing…), and probably burned out on these talents as much as he did in the computer field.

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