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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
haha I was thinking about the same :D
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
This made my day.
That’s SO COOL!
Awesome…you win todays internet! goodnight!
Oh my god I love it
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’.
EDIT: I know contamination isn’t t actually a thing but keeping a separate cat fork is a victimless crime ok?
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
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.
The dishwasher gets pretty hot and does a good job sanitizing
We have a cat fork too! It even has a special place it lives next to the sink
Cat fork people unite!
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.
I’ve got a spoon and some measuring cups just for the cat food too!
We’ve got something similar. The fork we have came in a pack of two. The one we don’t use for cat food is in the drawer with all the other forks and nobody ever uses it.
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)
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.
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.
Ahhh right!! A penis beaker!!
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.
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.
That’s not weird, that’s just smarter than the rest of us.
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.
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.
Sounds like you’re two steps away from filling timesheets
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 on something better than “crotch blanket”.
A pillow should be used here as I do
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
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.
Well wooden spoons can be used for spanking
I’m confused.
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.
Then he fucks it
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.
My grandfather used to run a fauna park with kookaburras. We had a meat grinder, like what’s used to make filling for pies and pasties, which was used to grind up baby chickens and mice into a paste for the kookaburras.
They also had a meat grind to use for pies and pasties so I hope they never mixed the two.
No need to look at your user name to know you’re from australia
I’m just finding out now that we had a poop knife…
A snake poop knife, for the stuck snake poop in the snake box.
I have nothing else to say about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.