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.
The fact that this is a common enough occurrence to warrant a special tool for the occasion makes me so jealous of your life
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.”
You have one badass cat.
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.
Oh pls i’d trade my position with you instantly, I hate frogs
QLD? Toilet frogs?
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.
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
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
Interesting. Our family does the exact opposite of this
I thought you were bringing the potato salad!?!?!
Sounds like you’re two steps away from filling timesheets
Your family sound like a corporation.
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.
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.
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.
That’s not weird, that’s just smarter than the rest of us.
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.
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I am aware of a poop knife being used in north Houston.
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.
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You talk like a book 😘
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.
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.
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.
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…
I have a tongue scraper that I keep in the shower. It is used exclusively for scraping dead skin from my heels.
It is not this but it does look like this.
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?
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?
Well wooden spoons can be used for spanking
I’m more of a chocolate person and confused as well.
I’m confused.
I need a picture of those spoons
We have a pair of tongs for fishing out stones that our youngest son (2) throws down an outside drain.
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
