We’ve been in the new house now just over a week, and I absolutely love it! We’re moving all our furniture and stuff over gradually (we were renting the other place, and budgeted for an extra month, so we wouldn’t have to move all in one day (how do people do that?)!)
The dishwasher is now in the house, but I’m still waiting for it to be plumbed in, so I have been washing up the old fashioned way for 7 people for 9 days! I have only had a dishwasher for 2 years out of 22 of being married, but having tried it, I loved it and don’t want to go back to hand washing! How spoiled I am!
I keep wondering how previous generations of wives and mothers coped with washing and cleaning and cooking without all the modern conveniences we have? My grandmother had a twin tub (separate compartments for washing and spinning) but before that, she did everything by hand. Getting married and having children was pretty much a commitment to a life of drudgery!
But the Amish, who are known for living a simple life with none of the gadgets we take for granted, believe that making life too easy is bad for the soul, an invitation to waste time with things that aren’t important or, worse, things that are sinful! (like television, perhaps, or facebook? lol) 🙂 Maybe they’re right, but I’m not ready to throw away my gadgets! I may be a homemaker, but I wanted to be a Starship Captain, remember?! I’m quite keen to get replicators installed! (It would give me time to study temporal mechanics!) 😉
In all the rush to simplify, de-clutter, downsize and go back to basics, what is most important? Why are we doing this? For me, the answer is twofold – I want to be with my children at home (and work for myself!), and I want to learn and preserve traditional crafts. But is it necessary to tie myself to a life of drudgery in order to do that? I don’t think so. Gadgets and machines are just tools. We can make use of them to make life more manageable. The trick, I think though, is not to allow ourselves to become so dependent on them that we can’t live without them.
Homesteading on New Earth 