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.
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 have a purpose made device for that job. It’s a clear plastic cone with a hollow handle at the point. Half the open end is closed off. Inside there is a semicircular ‘door’ with it’s own handle that sits inside the hollow one.
You place it over the creature that’s getting evicted, then rotate the inner handle so the door rotates over the opening, sealing it (taking care not to trap any legs).
Then go outside and reverse the process to release it.
Personally I don’t mind spiders and would rather have them around than the pests they eat, but wifey is incredibly arachnophobic, so they have to go.
If the spider is a native to the area, it will likely be able to survive outside, Crawford said. But if the spider is a transplant that’s become a house spider — even if its ancestors made the voyage to the “new” place decades to hundreds of years ago — odds are, the spider will perish outside, Crawford said.
That’s because most spiders are adapted to specific places and temperatures, Crawford said.
“The American house spider (Parasteatoda tepidariorum) [is] probably native to northern South America,” Crawford said. “It undoubtedly lives outdoors just fine if your backyard is in Brazil or Guyana.” Even species that moved from one climate to a similar one seem to have trouble. Take the giant house spider (Eratigena atrica), a native of England. It traveled west when the British settled British Columbia, Canada, and the species later made its way south, to Seattle.
Now, E. atrica can be found in houses across parts of the northwestern U.S. (including this reporter’s childhood home). But the species is hardly ever found outside, even though Seattle’s climate is fairly similar to London’s.
“You would think it could survive outside, but we never find it in natural habitats around here — just [in] man-made habitats, such as buildings, brick piles, junk piles and retaining walls,” Crawford said. "So, it does, in fact, survive to some extent outside of buildings, but always in a man-made shelter."
What to do
If you see a spider creep across your bedroom, don’t squish it — but don’t throw it outside, either, Crawford said. Instead, move it to another part of your residence where you don’t mind having spiders, such as the garage, he suggested.
I cannot find a way to “tag” you, but if you’re curious, I made a response to guyrocket with the information as to why it is how it is.
tl;dr The spiders who will die when thrown outside come from different regions where they can thrive, but where they became house spiders, they cannot thrive outside.
Fortunately for me, I live in an area where there are no dangerous spiders, but if you you live in India, Australia or some other place like that, you can usually safely assume that all the spiders are out there to get you. In my case though, you don’t need to worry about them, so we get along really well.
One night, I switched the lights off and went to bed. After a while, I realized I forgot to do something important, so I switched the lights back on and got up. In the middle of the now lit room I saw a big spider (tiny by Australian standards), and it quickly scurried along under the kitchen cabinets. I hadn’t seen this fellow before, because apparently that’s where it hides during the day. If it eats some bugs in the house, it can continue to live here. I don’t mind at all.
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.
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 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.
I like having house spiders, they are quiet and clean, and their webs are fairly discreet. My main interaction with them is helping them out of the bath before I have a shower. I offer a flannel, spider climbs aboard, I lift the flannel to the windowsill, spider exits. Another place I appreciate spiders is inside my beehives - they help keep wax moths at bay.
Hose centipedes are great too! My partner and I call them “Basement Friends” every other insect gets relocated outside, but the centipedes get to go to the basement.
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.
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?
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.
Pretty much all decent sized electric motors have a start up capacitor. They need an extra bit of energy to build up the magnetic fields, overcome static friction and accelerate the motor up to the operating speed.
It’s also one of the most common causes of an AC not working anymore. The capacitor has gone bad. Pay 40$ for the part and install it yourself, or pay a professional 500$.
Edit: for anyone not reading what the reply below says: there are some life-preserving critical measures you should take if you do it yourself. If you’re not comfortable, please don’t do it yourself.
We have the expression “look to the freshness of the shit you eat” in our native tongue. Its used to express disbelief at a situation. As far as I know, only our family has it.
It’s a reference to an old reddit post. In the post, the OP explained they had a knife at their toilet for poop that got stuck, hence the poopknife. It was only later in life when they asked a friend for their “poop knife”, when they discovered that nobody else has a knife like that and how weird it is.
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.
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.
Ancient story on my part, I forgot about it since I was a kid. A huge family and the most of the family was not petite which I thought was hilarious at the time. I think they had 10 kids with one bathroom, it was probably a necessity.
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
I have a set of tongs at home with frogs for the silicone grips. Living at the beach it’s not uncommon for green tree frogs to make their way inside the doggie door.
This is a common occurrence at my home as well. When there’s heavy rain frogs get caught in our window wells, some make it inside, some get caught between the windows and screen. I just put on a pair of gloves, fish em out and set them free on higher ground.
Once my cat frantically came yowling up the stairs with a frog in her mouth. Set it down gently, unharmed and stared at me loudly meowing as if to say “look what I found, WTF is this? Do something about it.”
It’s a Little wooden drower maybe 30cmx30cmx10cm divided in two for fine and coarse salt that Is situated under the kitchen cupboard on the right of the kitchen hood
my youngest brother had a lazy stick. It was a broom handle and a ruler taped together with a couple of chop sticks mixed in to help hold the two together. To avoid getting out of bed, he fashioned this up to turn off the lights in his room. Inspired by Homers broom in the episode of the Simpsons where he gains a ton of weight to go on disability.
This stick did the trick and even could turn the tv on and off.
Twenty years later, my brother is currently on a diet and losing a lot of weight. All the weight is post stick and much later in life, but we have a laugh about it every now and again.
I have a fetch ladle and a coal spoon. My dog lives for fetch but always sets the ball next to my feet. If I’m sitting on the back porch I don’t want to keep bending forward so I have a ladle that’s perfect for scooping up a tennis ball and throwing it. I also have a slotted spoon that I use to grab unburnt coal out of my grill before dumping the ashes. Both of these utensils just hang from my grill.
I have a under bed retrieving stick. My bed has a gap close to the wall, so object sometime fall in. Since the bed is to heavy to be easily moved. I leave a retriving stick. I could upgrade to a hook. But I like the challenge of using a stick.
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.
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.
Many years ago, I lived with two slobs. They often left dried food on the counters, floors, and other flat surfaces (like the stove top or floor of the oven). In addition, one of them fed their dog with human food that gave it the shits, and was not attentive towards talking the dog out to poop. So the floor would have clay-like puddles of drying dog diarrhea. This scraper was used to deal with the dollop of whatever organic matter was dried onto the counter, floor, or otherwise. Then washed in the next dishwasher cycle.
“But you’ll scratch the [surface material]!!!”
I don’t care. My house, my problem. Clean up after yourself, for fucks sake. Plus, I was always wiping down the counter with cleansers, so any cross contamination was not a concern. I am a voracious cleaner.
Those slobs have left, the dog passed away, and the dogs my wife and I have now are mostly housebroken and don’t have diarrhea. The scraper only rarely gets used these days. When she moved it, I had to explain to her what it was, though.
I have poop-tongs. I live on a boat and my dog poops on the deck, so I throw them off by using poop tongs. I keep them separate from where I have my grill accessories.
Plenty of people live on boats in the UK. Some boats can be fancy AF. Or very cheap. UK has an advanced man made canal system covering most of the country. The water is still there, there are charging stations, toilets, gas refills, etc available to boat dwellers. Canals were previously used for goods transportation across the country, but now we have trains, trucks and planes for that, so canals are now used for living and recreational travelling. And fishing ofc.
Probably have a ton of unusual/unique items, being a magician and juggler, but the one that comes to mind is our dedicated BBQ bellows.
This is simply an old re-purposed balloon pump and lives outside next to the fireplace. Best way to get the fire going, portable, cheap… Beats blowing with your mouth/waving newspaper hands down.
I have grill bellows as well! Also, for camping I got a “pocket bellows” which is basically a collapsible tube you blow in to get the fire going. Handy stuff!
Add comment