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.
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.
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.
A friend had the shower drain piped directly to his garden sprinkler at one point. His shower was on the 2nd floor so gravity did the rest.
I kinda want to go hmmm but honestly that’s kinda genius. I just hope he wasn’t growing food in that garden.
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.
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?
??? Why is it so crazy to imagine people let a tap run for two minutes?
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.
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.
The frog tong is one half of a pair of tongs yes. You lure the frog on it and catapult the fucker outside.
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.
Yoga swing.
Anytime an adult asks what it is and I explain. They always - always always - assume its a sex swing.
Which, admittedly it could very well be if the wife wasn’t so damn unwilling.
Then why do you have a full body gimp suit next to it?
Oh that? No no, that a errrr… a yoga suit
The ball gag is for the “Ommms” not to bother the neighbors …
I was like “oh what is the last word going to be?!”.
Which, admittedly it could very well be if the wife wasn’t so damn unwilling.
And here I am, being told by my wife that I will need to add tie-down rings to the bed I designed for us.
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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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.
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It should be noted that big capacitors can fuck you up bad if not discharged properly. It’s not hard, but you do need to be careful.
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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
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!”
Thanks!! I was sure I butchered it.
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 :)
That’s SO COOL!
So cool! Thanks for sharing.
This made my day.
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!
I’ve always called any fork that doesn’t match the set the “dog fork”, since when I grew up this was basically why we had the smaller, weird fork for our dogs and cats.
I’ve not had a dog since I was a kid, but any time my wife has accidentally brought cutlery from her work place that ends up in our drawer, I call it the dog fork.
This is how religions get started.
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.
I’ve got a spoon and some measuring cups just for the cat food too!
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.
Oh damn, that just unlocked a memory, we had the same thing when I was a kid
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)
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 have an internet pencil.
Getting reliable internet through the house while renting crappy houses means I end up using ethernet over power bricks.
Every couple of months they will fail and need to be power cycled but the switches on the power point are occluded by the EoP brick without enough room for my fat fingers.
I would just grab any pen or pencil to use as my switch flicking tool but they are constantly purloined by my children so I keep a special internet pencil on my desk.
I have a car clock pencil, it lives in my car sunscreen pocket and it’s used twice a year when the clocks go forward or back.
Maybe not for every room but I have been using moca over coax and it is way faster and more reliable than Ethernet over power.
As long as your house has decent rg6 coax, I had a place with rg59 and those moca adapters worked like shit. Also make sure that filter is in the right place!
Check out a short power plug cable, been a lifesaver for those bulky power blocks.
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 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
But…but I thought they ate gumdrops…
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.
The middle brother i take it?
Youngest brother, second youngest overall.
Interesting. Our family does the exact opposite of this
I thought you were bringing the potato salad!?!?!
You walk back in from school/work and find out extended family decided to drop in unannounced?
Your family sound like a corporation.
Sounds like you’re two steps away from filling timesheets
I have a tongue scraper that I keep in the shower. It is used exclusively for scraping dead skin from my heels.
It looks like this one.
Well now I know what to do with the other one
I have this exact same thing! My dentist reccomended it to me because I drink way too much coffee, which apparently causes like yellow orange film to form on your tongue
Huh that works?
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.
Now youre just mixing the poop knife and the frog tong mate
Wait, what’s a frog tong??
It’s exactly what it sounds like
Switch them up for a little extra flavor.
How the hell do u live on a boat
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.
Come to Amsterdam, we’ll show you how
But don’t be gross, bring your own poop-tongs.
Justpoopytings
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
The ‘leg pillow’. aka the shittiest pillow in the house to be dedicated as a between the knees pillow
I have found my people.
The real question is if the sex pillow and the knee pillow can be the same
you mean the cunt cushion ?
Hundred percent. No pillow case required
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 had a poop spork for similar purposes involving a lizard cage. It was good for fishing lizard poops out of the water dish.
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.
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.
