Too Bad My Dishwasher Doesn't Have a Drive Through

I wish everything in life had a 'convenient' alternative. Like fast food - a quick, easy, and cheap option when you are feeling lazy or short on time. (But with a lot less calories and artery-clogging stuff that is....) 

I tend to try to take the 'easy' route when it comes to a lot of things in my life. I use my crockpot a lot. I stuff the washing machine to its full capacity with every load. Hmm.... sometimes I even wash un-like colors together. (I'm sorry, Mom!.... and yes, I at least use the cold water setting!) I barely pre-rinse as I load the dishwasher. When I invite guests for dinner I buy pre-cut veggies to save the chopping time. And so on and so forth.....

I almost don't feel guilty blaming my love of convenience on society. Everywhere we turn today there is a new product, or a flashy display at the grocery store, or a loud commercial showing us how to make our lives easier. Recently, I decided I was going to stop buying chemical-filled kitchen spray cleaners and just use anti-microbial essential oils and water, with some Borax on hand for harder jobs. Better for my family and the environment - you know, the old school mentality. Anyway, in order to find an empty spray bottle that I could put my own mixture in I had to go to three stores before I found one (thanks, Lowes!). The grocery store didn't carry them and the super-store was charging nine dollars! (Nine dollars??? Get out of here...its a plastic spray bottle!) But in the same isle there were at least 50 different types of chemical-laden, magically-do-it-all-with-one-swipe cleaners in an array of pleasing scents. Convenience trumps healthy, do-it-yourself-ness. You get my drift.....  

I can't however, in good conscious , say it is all society's fault. I think it is ingrained in us to want to find the easy way out. That isn't entirely a bad thing - after all, most of my crockpot meals are cheap and tasty and wonderful timesavers - but I worry sometimes that convenience gets muddled together with laziness. That crossed my mind one night when I tried, unsuccessfully to pour soap into my dishwasher and discovered this in the bottom of the soap box: 

Ugh. One giant, hard as a rock, lump of solid dishwashing soap. I tried tapping it against the box to see if it would break apart. Then the counter. Then I banged at it with a wooden spoon handle. Nothing, zip, nada. It was one concrete, firm hunk of soap. So I threw it in the trashcan. And then, in the next thought, I felt bad and fished it back out. That would have been a lot of soap (which equates to money) to waste simply because I felt like 'eating the bread of idleness'. (Pr. 31:27)

So, I got out a spoon and chiseled. And, currently, I have been using this same hunk-a-soap for nearly one month! - with hardly any reduction in size. Truly, I haven't even made a dent in it. Yes, its kind of annoying to bend over my dishwasher and use a spoon to grate away at the side of it, and yes, it takes a few extra seconds to fill my soap dispenser this way, but it works. And now that I think about it, I am ashamed at how much perfectly usable soap I would have been throwing away over my own lazy bone.

What is laying around your house, or being underutilized, or headed for the wastebasket in the name of 'convenience' that you can still make use of?