Tag House Stuff

Things I think I think

Michael 5 Comments

Now that I’ve had my fill of ranting for a while here, it’s time to catch up on some thing that have been floating around in my brain and make some room up there for future ramblings.

thumbnail_IMG_0599Have you ever tried to grow a tree from an avocado pit? Let me rephrase that, have you never tried to grow a tree from an avocado pit? I think that’s required in “Things to do in your first adult kitchen 101.” I tried and sort of even succeeded. Sort of. For a while I had an actual tree. It stood about 5 feet tall but was only as big around as a school pencil. Unfortunately, not quite as sturdy. My latest experiment was “let’s grow a pineapple plant from the crown of one.” (The things we did while locked in.) A year later I have not just one, but two.  I wonder if this is how Dole got started.

I recently ranted over the increasing number of loaded guns brought to airport security. The most common excuse for such behavior was “Duh, I forgets I was packing a rod.” I found a story about another feller who forgot he was carrying a loaded weapon. This guy brought his gun not the airport but to his bathroom. As he dropped his pants to drop into the seat, the gun dropped out of his pocket into the floor and went off, sending the bullet through the bathroom floor which doubled as the bathroom ceiling to the apartment below where it met the hand of another young man, unarmed but now not unharmed. You can’t blame the gun guy. There have been alligator sightings in the area and you never know when one might pop up anywhere there is water. (My conjecture, not his explanation. He said he forgot it was in his pocket. Yeah, right.)

Service with aAre there any grandfather clock aficionado out there? I have a contemporary long case that has travelled with me now through three homes and resided in multiple places at each. The years have been kinder to the case than the movement. It is still in great shape, shapewise, but it runs late. Not slow. Late. It keeps a 60 minute hour today as good as the day it was uncrated but little by little it has developed its unique peculiarity of chiming the hour late. We’re now up to 5 minutes late. It’s not unusual for a guest when hearing the chime to comment, “Oh it’s x o’clock, no wait, I have 5 after. Your clock is slow,” and I respond, “No, it’s not slow, it’s late.” It has taken 20 years for the chime to be out of sync by 5 minutes. (Out of synch?) An optimist would note that in another 220 years, it will work its way around and be right on time.

Just two rants ago I questioned what could be more valuable than your own child in response to Consumers Union’s suggestion that until all manufacturers put warning devices to alert to unforgotten children locked in the back of hot cars, one should put something of value there that you would not likely forget. For one young father around here last week, that should have been tacos. Apparently, the good lad had a hankering for tacos. Not just any tacos, he wanted the kind available only at the local casino. There he parked his car, left his children behind just to run in and place the order, then decided he might as well wait for that order sitting in front of a slot machine instead of in front of his steering wheel. Security cameras caught his elation at hitting a jackpot about the same time they caught his kids waiting alone in the car. No word on how long the tacos were waiting.

Okay, sharp witted readers may have inferred that I implied this post might be rant-free, yet 50% was rant-like. Let’s call it rank-lite. Hey, I’m making progress!

Name That Gadget

Michael 4 Comments

Dear followers, readers, friends (and who’s to say you might not be all of the above) and other people who have just wandered onto this but also might someday become follower, reader and/or friend, I need your help. But first, a story.

A few months ago a number of TV cooking shows that I watch and cooking magazines that I read featured bad gadgets. Everybody seemed to want to do their version of the Top Ten Worst Kitchen Gadgets. I didn’t get it. Why waste all that time and space on things that don’t work. It seems to me that most people with enough brains to operate a toaster oven can tell the worthwhile helpers from the culinary dreadfuls.

That being said, I indeed also have bought an occasional pig sticker in a poke. Usually they end up used once, uncovered for their uselessness, and then relegated to the “save for the next garage sale” box.

By the same token there are those gadgets that were once useful but now take up space in the drawer and have been made less useful to me because of changes in the things or way I cook or because new and improved really was. Every once in a while I take a turn through those cabinets and these items find themselves in that aforementioned box though not due to any fault of their own.

However (dramatic pause more than you might typically ascribe to a comma please), there is one gadget that I use with some regularity and I wonder why. No, it was never on any Worst Gadget List and it has never been supplanted by a better version. At least I don’t think so. You see, I don’t know what it is. I know what I use it for but I don’t know what it’s used for. Exactly.

And now, question time. What the heck is it?

thing

It’s about the size of a dinner fork, made of hard plastic, has no markings on it, and bears a familial resemblance to a crochet hook. I use it to clean the inside edges of the beaters from a hand mixer. It’s also handy for cleaning out the underside of a squeeze bottle cap and flicking open the battery compartment of thermometers, timers, and scales. It’s also good for digging small seeds out of small fruits and vegetables, and probably animals if you had that kind of mind. (Yes, there once was a time when my life wasn’t even quite this thrilling.) I would ask somebody around here but I’ve had it forever and nobody who was here then is still now, or anybody who is here now wasn’t there then.

If you know what it is, please help.  Otherwise I’m going to have to put it out at the next garage sale and wait for someone to pick it up and say, “Oh look, a whachamacallit like those people at the rare kitchen gadget store had on display for 43 billion dollars. And it’s only a quarter. Let’s offer him 20 cents.”

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?