I don’t mean what you use to chop down your feces, but an object that you realized only your family has and people would raise their eyebrows at. Best if said object has a sole purpose.
We’ve got a frog tong. Every time a frog gets in the house catch it with a tong and toss it in the garden.
How often are frogs getting in?
Very often during the monsoon season. Like twice a week or so. The rest of the year, barely. Summers is for lizards.
This might be a dialect thing, but I’m intrigued at what one tong is? I’m in Australia and we only have pairs of tongs - like we only have pairs of pants - and I’ve never heard them referred to in the singular.
I don’t like to use ‘pair of’ for things like tongs or spectacles spectacles which are one physical item. I do it for stuff like shoes tho. I think pair of tongs is technically correct tho
Well you did write tong before and not tongs which is what was being asked. It should still be plural, even without the “pair of” bit.
Bucket in the shower to collect run-off water for flushing? Thought it was standard until I learned people don’t even bother turning the faucet off when brushing their teeth.
What I love so much about the whole “turning the water off when you brush your teeth” debate is how everyone is basically telling on themselves.
The ADA recommends brushing your teeth for two minutes. Do you think anybody sits there and lets the water wash down the drain for two whole minutes? Or more likely does everyone have terrible dental hygiene?
I lived with people who would have full political debates with a tooth brush in their mouth and the tap on.
Why does it matter how much I use? Agriculture uses 20 times more than I do!
Said after a tossing half their food away…
Bro unfortunately I do belive people would be careless enough to do that.
Had roommates that when they did dishes would keep the water running instead of filling up the sink. Didn’t matter if it was even a few days worth of dishes.
I even mentioned to them about it, they said they just didn’t want to put their hands in a sink full of dirty dish water.
People really do be that senseless.
People also have a dishwasher but prefer to do dishes by hand with the water running the whole time because they think the dishwasher wastes water and does a worse job. They don’t bother to look up why the dishwasher does a worse job (it’s always because they don’t put any soap in the pre wash tray) and refuse to accept that they could be wrong.
??? Why is it so crazy to imagine people let a tap run for two minutes?
I see you’ve never experienced a drought
Or lived off grid where they had to pump their water, or used only rainwater harvesting.
Because that is an absurdly long time to watch water run when you’re not using it for anything. I feel like “turn off the tap when brushing your teeth” would be inherently obvious to people brushing the full two minutes.
What’s more likely to me is people brush for about 15 seconds and don’t bother turning it off because it’s such a short period of time.
I feel bad enough when I’m letting the tap run during dishes when it’s taking me a second to scrub something lol
I want a foot pedal for my kitchen sink so badly. I feel like it would save a lot of water and I’d never have to touch the sink with my gross hands I need to wash.
Ditto! Why the fuck is this not just how sinks work?
We had these sinks in my elementary school bathroom and I’ve only seen them in one other public bathroom since. I’m really not sure why it isn’t more common.
Get a touch-free faucet. It’s awesome.
Get one of those swiveling heads with a shutoff. Game changer for sure.
It’s really not that long. I leave it on both as I’m brushing, and as I’m swishing mouth wash around. About 3 and a half minutes total. It’s not on purpose, it’s just because I don’t think to turn it off.
You’re wasting, proportionally, a fuck load of water
I hope you will think twice about it from now on. Not trying to be a lesson giver really, it’s just very important. The next wars are going to be fought over water and food. Where I live we have running water during 12hrs every three days, because of climate change and corruption (long story) so we have come to appreciate water, especially when it’s drinkable (it isn’t anymore, those 12hrs of running water are for other uses only).
water is precious
Plus there is LITERALLY ZERO BENEFIT to leaving the water on. It’s just pure waste. If I was learning to brush my teeth for the first time, turning off the water would have been the intuitive solution.
For me at least, brushing teeth is highly uncomfortable and the brushing noise from inside my head makes it worse. Running water dampens the noise. I learned to turn off the tap most of the time but I leave it on for when I’m out of mental batteries.
Our water bill is included in the rent, the amount we use doesn’t affect it, so I could do that. I don’t because why would I, but I could.
However, on a couple occasions I have opened just the hot water tap in the bathroom and let it run for 15 minutes, doors open, to steam up the air. It was winter, very cold, and air moisture content was like 15%, extremely dry.
That is mad. I am super conservative with the water i use but this all goes to a treatment plant
It’s not about treatment, in a severe drought there are financial penalties for excessive water use, and this is one way avid gardeners can cope.
Tap water isn’t drinkable here unfortunately
I mean, do we really need to flush with drinking water? It’s literally drinking water straight into the toilet. 6l at that for “big business” and 4 for a single whizz. And that multiple times a day.
I found myself thinking about that. I looked at the clean water on the toilet and thought, that’s the exact same water, from the exact same source, that comes out of the kitchen faucet I use to drink and cook… What a fucking waste… (water is drinkable here ofc)
I sometimes see those eastern flushes with a tap on top that you can use to wash your hands or wtv and so the runoff water goes into the flush reservoir. I thought that was a great idea but, I think recently on lemmy someone asked about something that sounds like a good idea but isn’t, and someone spoke about those toilet/sinks. I don’t remember what the issues were but at the time I thought it made sense not to use it.
Still kinda hurts flushing perfectly good water down the drain :/
I had one when I lived in Japan. It filled the tank by running water out of a little faucet and the mini sink drained into the tank. If I recall the water stream was pretty small and low pressure. It was on a western style toilet so you had the toilet bowl in front of you in the way also. It’s been twenty years ago so my memory is a bit foggy but I remember not using it for much.
I actually really enjoy this idea. Thank you
My parents had a cow watering tub in the porch connected to the gutter for this purpose, but it was because the well dried up sometimes.
Well, if it counts, we have a homemade potato grating machine from the Soviet times my grandfather has made because he was a genius and partly because of Soviet Union. It draws a lot of energy, emits a lot of noise (seriously). To turn on, it has two buttons, one for capacitor or something, another for the motor itself and, nowadays, I have no clue which one I should turn on first, left or right… It stands on three legs and weighs around 10 kg (old transformers were heavy). It produces good results, though, despite looking odd.
Nornally first the capacitor and then the motor. The capacitor is there to absorb the power surge when the motor starts up.
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If you’re on single phase power, you almost always need something like a start capacitor, at least for large-ish motors. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the reliability of the grid, and moreso how single-phase AC motors work.
If that is a start capacitor, OP might actually want to shut it off once the motor is running, as they’re typically not meant to run continuously. Usually, there’s a mechanism that disconnects the start capacitor once the motor is up to speed, but it’s not strictly necessary
I wonder how their opa figured this out. Did he try it out and encountered problems when starting the motor? Then maybe got suggestion to add a capacitor?
He probably had some practical knowledge when doing this…
It’s not like people in the USSR we’re all uneducated or something. Like, they knew how electricity worked, same as in the west.
Man the red scare propaganda really does live on.
Engineers are needed in all modern societies, capitalist or socialist.
Engineering education was really good. I read some Physics and some Math textbooks, and they are amazing. Same goes with Chemistry.
On the other hand, History education was all about how kings and grand dukes were bad, and how Lenin was great. Same goes with Arts, Literature and Philosophy (I once stumbled upon a book that says how class warfare was among the Greek elite, Plato was bad idealist and Democrites and Aristotle were good because they comply with the Marxist Materialism. And that was in a Math history schoolbook!) Plus a lot of discrimination, children of Party members were given good grades, even if one looks for Japan in the Africa (a real case). Ethnical discrimination (Russian chauvinism) also existed, the idea that “everything was made by Russians” and silencing the other USSR and foreign nations’ achievements. We see a war in Ukraine as a continuation of this idea.
But, going back, yes, people knew knew how electricity, space travel, nuclear power and particle accelerators worked.
EDIT: mismatched closing delimiter
Video please, internet stanger?
Here you go, internet stranger: https://spectra.video/w/dre1z1tfm3KDupVCfi8MhS
No beer to power it up. It’s 8:49 PM in Lithuania and my neighbours will be mad.
Note: the capacitor says:
МБГО ¬2 20мкф ±10% 500в 1077 ОТКWhich means 20 micro-pharads capacity, rated for 500 volts.
EDIT: no markings on the motor.
EDIT2: apparently, these capacitors are still being sold.
Awesome. Very Interesting. Thank you!
You’re welcome :)
Interesting
So cool! Thanks for sharing.
This made my day.
That’s SO COOL!
Awesome…you win todays internet! goodnight!
This definitely deserves its own post.
Reminds me of the joke I heard from the TV series Chernobyl. From memory:
Q: What weighs 2 tons, emits lots of smoke and noise and cuts apples into 3 pieces?
A: A Soviet machine designed to cut apples into 4 pieces.
“What’s big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces?”
“A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces!”
haha I was thinking about the same :D
Oh my god I love it
We have a pvc pipe cutter that is used to cut up frozen small animals, like quail and mice, for our raptors. It works really, really well.
Now this is what i’m talking about lol
The Rodent Reductors - for Raptors!
My parents’ old place had the bat towels and the bat box.
Bats would hang out in our garden eating bugs and such. But they’d sometimes get confused, flop into the house, and get stuck. We live in a third world country, there isn’t some organization we can call to properly care for the bats, but we’re not stupid and we know that handling a wild animal is bad for us and the critter.
So. Old beat up towels. Toss one on the floor next to the crawling bat. It’ll cling to it. Lift the towel from a distance. Gently drop it in the box. Put the box next to a tree. Bat will find the tree and find its way home.
I like this. Beats a poop knife any day.
Awe, and it’s so respectful to the bats, too; it’s sweet to hear.
Bats are babeys
And they keep the dengue fever away.
My family has rules and positions we vote on. We’re all adults out of the parents’ house. We collaborate on a lot of projects and travel together in different combinations; the rules, or guidelines really, make us more efficient.
I am often travel coordinator for joint trips. Someone else handles food coordination specifically. The youngest calls meetings, usually on a quarterly to yearly cadence, and publishes the meeting notes to a shared cloud drive. Another is in charge of coordinating a Christmas gift exchange. We’ve rotated being financial and medical backup/adviser to the parents and those roles also comes with responsibility to update the other siblings on major changes.
Is there a political drama on your family, would love to watch it
One brother doesn’t share or give up decision making well. The roles are intended to be project manager rather than dictator; the person is still expected to solicit opinions and delegate tasks to others. He gets frustrated really quickly when he doesn’t get his way entirely and will get to a point where he doesn’t hear other people’s perfectly reasonable views.
But it’s been this way forever, it’s his personality. He knows it. A few of us are pretty good at calling attention to his behavior in a way that he doesn’t feel attacked by and he’ll chill out. One just goes toe to toe more aggressively with him and that tactic works sometimes too.
How much shit does your family go through that you need bylaws and a treasurer?
Probably the one reality show I’d watch.
It would be very dull. Lots of spreadsheets and bulleted agendas.
Just a big family that lives all over the country, sometimes world. We all want to stay close and this is what works for us. We maintain very low levels of shit and would like to keep it that way.
The middle brother i take it?
Youngest brother, second youngest overall.
Hi,
I’m writing to
apply for a position inbe adopted by your family. I heard of your family from a Lemmy post.I have administration and finance experience. I’m highly organised and enjoy working in dynamic teams.
I can start
workingliving in the position from mid November as I need to give my previous family a month’s notice. I look forward to hearing from you.Kind Regards,
Isoprenoid
Sounds like you’re two steps away from filling timesheets
The toaster bottle opener.
A metal combination bottle opener/can tapper which is kept by the toaster oven and used to pull the hot rack out to get your food.
Ours has a magnet and is stuck to the toaster. Long since abandoned since most cants with ridges don’t like to open well without just using a can opener and removing the whole can lid.
It gets too hot if if I leave it attached, so I use a non-magnetic one which sits loosely nearby.
I had a (well, several) toasters that didn’t pop so well in my early travels through life and people would go crazy if I did this without unplugging it. Lol. I’m not raking the fork across the elements and the element is off, so…
Anyway, one of those disposable, wooden chop sticks works well for this and keeps people from thinking you either have never heard of electricity or have a death wish.
You can carve a little notch on the end if we’re talking about a toaster oven (like a crochet hook).
That’s not weird, that’s just smarter than the rest of us.
I’m so confused by the poop knife. What in the hell is a poop knife?! WHY?!
My family is NORMAL and we have NORMAL things in the house!!! WHAT THE FUCK IS A POOP KNIFE OR THE FUCKING FROG TONGS YOU PEOPLE ARE INSANE
In case you are unaware, “poop knife” was a reddit r/confession post from a few years back that went viral, where someone admitted their family has a knife kept in the house specifically for when big ‘movements’ wouldn’t flush, and he had just discovered that wasn’t a normal thing everyone just has at home when he needed flush assistance at a friends house.
You ever read the cumbox guy’s piece? That guy was understated comedy gold.
The coconut was the best
Ahhh right!! A penis beaker!!
You ever drive down a rural road, and out the window you suddenly come across an old shuttered up house? The kind of house with five cars parked on the front lawn in various states of disrepair? With overgrown bushes pushing into the peeling paint of the wooden siding alongside a giant novelty bigfoot that seems to stare at you as you zip by down the road? The one with the chain link fence that’s torn in five places and yellowed trailer up on blocks? The one with a dog tied to a post, barking it’s head off outside, so you know someone actually lives there?
I imagine these threads are like a window into the lives of the people in those houses. It’s like they’re living in a whole different society, with their weird quirks and vaguely unsettling rituals.
Funny this is pretty close to the truth when it comes to the things described in this thread.
Poop Knife - Bad diet, large BM’s = financially poor diet = trailer Frog Tongs - trailers tend to have bad gaps in windows Etc
Hahaha no it’s just the monsoon.
You talk like a book 😘
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I shall take that as a compliment
I want to believe this is all /s but I haven’t gotten the feel of Lenny quite yet.
We have a fork specifically for cat food. It’s different from all our other forks (we bought it separately) and it’s used exclusively for ‘mashing’ and dividing wet cat food.
We love our cats and we love to give them the food they like but wet cat food is disgusting and we’d rather not risk cross contamination.
We got an egg folk, bowl and sponge. Mum hated things that touched eggs to touch anything else.
I’m learning that my household had a shit tonne of weird things
If your cat food is disgusting, you’re buying bad cat food. For the love of cats, start feeding them decent stuff, please.
The food is fine and they go bananas for it so who am I to judge? The disgust is wholly my own.
We have a cat fork too! It even has a special place it lives next to the sink
Cat fork people unite!
I use a regular fork when mashing dog food, and the fork goes directly into the dishwasher afterwards. I can’t fathom what kind of cross contamination that would lead to.
You are lucky. My mom used the same dishes we used ourselves for the cat food and would rinse them off in the sink with a sponge. And she used a different dish every time so no bowl or plate in the house was safe. Made me feel icky eating dinner out of a cat food bowl but she thought I was strange for caring.
Enamel is non-porous afaik so you’re completely safe. That’s one of those natural human responses that’s actually unwarranted if you consider modern materials (and the fact that cat food is really just meat)
We have a similar spoon for dog food. My wife wasn’t paying attention and it got ripped up in the garbage disposal several years ago. It is easily identified by its jagged edges.
Oh damn, that just unlocked a memory, we had the same thing when I was a kid
Try not buying paté and use chunks or slivers instead. Also pet food is made with the meat from stores like Walmart that was getting too close to the expiration date. It should be totally safe for humans to consume and doesn’t have a risk of contaminating you and making you sick.
No where near the poop knife, but people are weirded out that I use a power drill for dishes. I don’t have a washer and the drill dose things a rag could never conceive of.
Like make a hole in it?
They use a special bit for dishes. The dish bit destroys the dishes so you never have to clean them again!
It’s an option.
But not the one fate had in mind
I sometimes use the drill for the hand cranked coffee grinder when I’m late and forgot to grind coffee the night before.
To be fair we own a coffee grinder but we use it for grinding dried chillies.
After an earlier Lemmy/reddit comment, im buying a second electric coffee grinder for Dried Mushrooms and Chillis.
Is it something like the Drill Brush? https://www.amazon.com/Drillbrush-Bathroom-Surfaces-Scrubber-Cleaning/dp/B01MRLZ43B. I have some of those and haven’t tried them on dishes, but they work great for cleaning grout.
Aren’t you worried about getting the drill wet?
Yep, everyone is some how freaked out over water damaging a $20 drill. It’s 12v, I can lick that voltage if I wanted. The only down side is splash back at full power.
By “aren’t you worried about getting the drill wet?” I was more concerned about damaging the drill. I guess it makes sense you’d use a cheap drill for it.
At my parents’ house, the shower bucket. At my house, the kitchen jug.
The water heater is at the other end of their house from the bathroom. My water heater is in the middle of the house, the kitchen is on the end. It takes awhile for hot water to reach their shower/my kitchen sink and dishwasher. So, in order to not just waste that clean if cold water by running it down the drain, we catch it and use it for something. I use it to water my vegetable garden.
Basically I fill my watering can from the cold water that comes out of the hot tap before I start my dishwasher.
My partners say I’m weird and wasting time but my shower bucket is how I remember to water my plants. Is the shower bucket empty? Guess I watered the plants 👍
Growing up with stage 4 water restrictions, the shower bucket and kitchen jug was a standard in our state.
The kitchen jug was used as potable water, we’d keep it handy for boiling pasta. The strained pasta water would be cooled and used to flush the toilet.
The shower drain, and laundry drain was connected to a grey water tank which was used for watering plants and the toilet cistern (which had a brick in it, because even though we already had a duel flush system, every drop counted) I remember having to swap to special shampoo to avoid ruining the grey water.
Occasionally dad would reroute the shower hose because he was just having a “quick rinse” (eg, no soap or shampoo) and he’d fill a separate drum that he’d then use to wash the car. Washing your car was banned unless you used grey water.
We still occasionally got a fine for using too much water for a household of our size.
As a kid I didn’t really understand that this was an environmental issue, we kept it up long after the water restrictions were lifted so I thought it was just dad being frugal.
So when I moved out I just continued with my water saving habits, but it turns out water is really cheap when there isn’t an active drought, and living in a share house with 10 other people who didn’t have the same water saving habits quickly killed the shower bucket and kitchen jug.
Now that it’s just me and my partner, I should reintroduce the shower bucket. My plants would love it.
Wife and I have since established the crotch blanket ™. It’s really just a flat sheet, but we each have our own and take them even when we travel. Keeps your legs and bits from sticking in the heat, and crumpled correctly it supports your knees while you sleep.
Not that weird as an idea, but wish we would have settled one something better than “crotch blanket”.
A pillow should be used here as I do
We have a pair of tongs for fishing out stones that our youngest son (2) throws down an outside drain.
The frog tongs reminded me of my spider box. Because I think spiders are good and reduce insect population I don’t kill them. Instead I have a shoebox with a piece of paper in it. Get spider on paper, they usually crawl right onto it if you hold it near them. Then throw paper into shoebox and close the box. Shoebox should seal and not have holes, btw. Most shoeboxes do not seal. Then take the box outside and open. +1 spider population in your yard.
I was going to say that having some method of relocating spiders outside is pretty common (whether it’s a shoebox, Tupperware container, etc), but maybe I just think that because I’m Australian and we often see spiders inside in Australia lol
At some point I realized that I don’t have to kill every dumb creature that makes the mistake of existing inside my house as my parents taught me.
So I also have live catch traps for mice. Dont get many at all but they get dropped off a couple miles from my house.
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Damn, they must have been so happy when we finally invented houses
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I’m not sure how tagging here works either. I guess that makes sense about the spiders. I usually just put them in a hallway.
Really? Do you have a citation for that?
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Is that uncommon? I also have a small box next to my bed for trapping bugs so that I can release them outside. Bonus points if it’s transparent and you get to see them up close.
I really don’t know how common it is. I think you’re one of the few people to tell me they also do it.
Clear is a great idea.
I don’t even care if they’re in my home. We get harmless ones
I didn’t really mind them. When they crawl accross my desk I take that as a request to go outside. I don’t think they’re going to last very long inside my house bevause there are not many bugs to eat.
back then, we all thought they were our normal breakfast spoons until we accidentally found photos of our roommates abusing them as sex toys
First i’m hearing of spoons that are specific to breakfast
I’m confused.
Sorry, vanilla person here: how does one use a spoon as a sex toy?
I’m more of a chocolate person and confused as well.
I need a picture of those spoons
