What's your houses equivalent of a poop knife.
What's your houses equivalent of a poop knife.
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.”
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 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.
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?
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.
yes to both. a lot of people my age (low-mid 20s) let the water run and also have bad dental hygiene... I only ever stopped letting the water go down the drain after a few years of paying my own water bill
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.
I leave my tap running all the time for wayy over 2 minutes. Mainly cos where i live pays for the water and they are complete assholes so i try cost them as much as possible.
That is mad. I am super conservative with the water i use but this all goes to a treatment plant
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.
I do the bucket. It's not an inconvenience really.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
What is this poop knife everyone is referring to
Something to chop up a large and/or stiff poop so it will flush properly.
Wife and I have since established the crotch blanket (tm). 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".
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 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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
We have a pair of tongs for fishing out stones that our youngest son (2) throws down an outside drain.
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.
I need a picture of those spoons
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 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.
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.
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.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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Just got an air mattress battery pump. It's like cheating for starting fires.
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!
We have a suite of kitchen tools because sometimes walking downstairs to the garage is to far when all you want to do is measure something real quick or quickly tighten or loosen a screw.
Haha we have a kitchen hammer and screwdriver! Our family found a similar drawer in a vacation home and laughed about it; then we got home and realized how often you just need one of those and it’s great to have one right there!
For a while we had the kitchen shovel.
It was a garden trowel that we had washed and used as a very large spoon when we first moved in, because we hadn’t found the silverware yet.
Sir/Madam do you live in a mansion?
No, just lazy
I also have a small kitchen toolbox under my sink. Tape measure, screwdrivers, an adjustable wrench, pliers, and a small hammer.
It's so I don't have to pull my large toolbox out from the closet in the other room, when I just need to tighten one loose screw. It's trivial, but a necessity for me now
I think a small kitchen tool set is pretty common.
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.
We have fully furnished poop cutlery
Toeknife
Botched toe!
Give me some trash to plug the wound.
You're saying this because of the IASIP episode, right?
Yes but have you tried a toe spoon?
We have a felony stick...I'd tell you what it's for, but for obvious reasons.... 🤫
Cool, we had a felony belt when I was a kid
OMG this is so wrong you raise your kids the same way all of humanity has for the entirety of history. how could you
For most of human history, slavery was a normal thing, I'm not sure your argument is a good one.
Most people evolve and figure out what works for discipline and what doesn't.
Others just beat the shit out of everyone who annoys them including their own kids, and then wonder why those kids grow up to either be massive douchebags, or cut contact with their parents as soon as they can.
Pickle fork
This one is a real thing and it's pretty convenient.
Works great for those pesky stuck ball joints
Drywall patching spade that is a stain scraper.
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.
Congratulations on losing the housemates, they're gross
Pellet pole for my pellet smoker. It's a 4ft long reflective marker (for marking edge of driveway when it snows) that I use to push the wood pellets to the middle of the pellet storage hopper towards the auger at the bottom.
How big is your hopper? Ours is only like 24" deep at most.
I just have a long screwdriver slotted on the push bar. It works great for preventing the pellets from doming.
Face scrubber. I was given a small crocheted dish scrubber - sort of like these - made from very soft tulle. It's too soft to be effective on dishes, but it works perfectly on my face.
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.
In my kitchen I have a drawer full of salt next to the gas. Pretty convenient! It's also divided in 2 sections with coarse and fine salt.
as someone who cooks and cleans out the (bottoom of the) utensil drawer quite regularly this gives me anxiety
I'm picturing a whole drawer, is that correct? Next to like a gas cylinder?
Next to a stove, if im understanding correctly
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
I saw a video of someone having a flour drawer which seemed even weirder to me. Also it really looked like a cocaine drawer.
Christmas Tree knife
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.
I have a few of these.
Most fitting of these is a tabo. No need for a bidet when water just needs motion. The last time a stranger saw it, they were a child who I had to stop from drinking from it.
A Wii U. The most underrated console of all time because it was only successful enough to make a dozen games on it, yet here I am using it everyday. Hijackers never gonna seize a Wii U.
A hammock. People will always ask me why I have one just lying around in the home, but the truth is at times it's more comfortable than a bed.
A garage. You might be thinking "that's not so bad", that is, until you learn I don't drive (or rather I took lessons but was like nope) and wouldn't put a vehicle in there anyways (add to that I witnessed a house catch on fire because a car caught fire because of badly mass produced batteries). It's mostly for other peoples' vehicles, but it's only been used for a handful of nights. For the majority of the time, it's for storage, especially as it has a second attic.
The biggest poop knife equivalent of all though? A Lemmy account. People discover my Lemmy account from DeviantArt (when they finally decide to look up the username) and they ask "what do you do on there when you got Reddit too". And to them I say this. But seriously, one does not hold the world record for the most websites having signed up for (provable but it takes a long time) and not expand one's horizons.
