Roberta Stuart

So here at the Funny Farm, the proprietor continues to put in 12- to 14-hour days. Got a meeting in another two hours, which means no time to write this post AND get any significant other work done. WTF…I’m writing. Dammit, I get a chance to have a cup of coffee and rest for a few minutes.

Yesterday FaM subscribers received an email warning…uhm, advising you all that I soon will be emanating a kind of business newsletter from the Camptown Ladies site, holding forth more about the adventure of starting a new publishing enterprise than about the Racy Books themselves.

Speaking of the which, I see I’ve failed to mention our latest shenanigan, The Ouija Lover. Actually, this randy little number is one of my favorite books. The characters come to life quickly and are pretty entertaining — they get more so in the second book of the series, The Taming of Bonnie. The conceit — the “concept” in Hollywoodese — is really bizarre. So that went online yesterday, available for your browsing pleasure at this very moment.

The Ouija Lover is one of several spooky-themed stories that we’re publishing in honor of Halloween and La Dia de los Muertos. Only one of them, Kelpie (scheduled for publication next week), is really very dark.

Interestingly, most of the Camptown Races stories are fairly light and upbeat. That, apparently, is the overall mood of my writers. The occasional heavy or dark piece is an intriguing exception. I think that’s because these stories are very fun to write and (we hope) fun to read. We’re all getting a hoot out of creating racy stories!

Meanwhile, life goes on. In altogether different realms … I wish to sic one of our fictional spooks on the dunderheads who came up with “high-efficiency” home appliances. There’s another bizarre conceit: the idea that a piece of equipment that takes twice as long to do the job and does it badly (so the job often has to be done over again) magically saves electricity and water. Where do people dream these ideas up?

The present target of my ire is (again) the expensive Bosch dishwasher that I installed to replace the deceased (allegedly less marvelously “efficient”) model. This is the one that won’t get your dishes clean unless you run it on the “Sanitize” cycle, thereby engaging an internal heater that boosts the water’s heat enough to wash off the dirt without benefit of functional detergent. The cycle that takes two hours and forty-one minutes of electric power to wash a load of dishes that would take you about 15 minutes and no electric power (assuming you have a gas water heater) to wash by hand.

Now, I happen to own a set of Christofle silverware that the ex- and I bought back when we were flush and dumb. After we split, I took the silver with me. And I thought at the time, I am gonna use this silver and not save it for a special occasion, BECAUSE special occasions never come and I love this stuff.

So for the past 18 or 20 years, I’ve used the Christofle every day, with every meal. Early on, I found a set of stainless that knocks off Christofle’s design (no longer available: patent infringement?), which I use for cooking. And early on, I learned that if you keep the stainless separate from the silver, you can run the silverware through the dishwasher with no harm.

Well. So it went until I acquired the current “efficient” Bosch. After I figured out that the only way to get the contraption to work was to run it on the sani-cycle every time, I found that suddenly the silver was tarnishing and needed to be repolished every time I turned around. (Normally I’d polish the silver maybe once every six months or a year — if you’re using it all the time, it doesn’t tarnish unless you leave it sitting in lemon juice or some such.)

WTF? Why was I suddenly having to polish the silver every two weeks?

Finally I figured out that it must have something to do with the heat in the washer’s sanitize cycle. If you want the dishes clean, you can’t put the silverware in there.

And that means that if I want to use my silver, I have to wash every piece by hand after every meal!!!!

Thank you, dear environmentally correct hucksters, for taking us back to the 1950s in one more aspect of our lives.

Now, in general I’m none too fond of housework. But of all the housework chores, I hate washing dishes by hand with the deepest passion. It’s one thing to have to wash the laundry by hand once every week or two. But another thing altogether to have to wash eating utensils by hand two or three times a day.

It’s such a nuisance, in fact, that I’m thinking about packing up the silver, hiding it from the burglars somewhere or giving it to my son, and just going over to Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel and buying a set of decent stainless.

The Christofle knock-off stainless is cheap and light-weight. The real stuff, the silver, has a nice heft to it, which adds to the pleasure of a nice meal. A better set of stainless would have that quality, and it also would go in the dishwasher. Voilà: one annoyance gone. Sort of.

Crate & Barrel has some very attractive 18/10 designs. They’re not cheap, but they’re not horribly expensive. I just resent having to put away something I’ve made part of my daily life and that I enjoy using. Nor do I want to spend money on something like this because of some stupid “improvement” that’s utterly unnecessary, ineffective, and unfair.

Pisseth me off.