Tag: household-tips

By on

Back in July, I introduced my first household tip, I am now ready for my second. The gap in time should give you some hint on how seriously I take household chores.

Bob and I are getting ready to move so we are getting rid of our unused possessions at a prodigious pace. One of our tasks in this process is a garage sale. I know Tom and Garage Sale would seem like contradictory concepts as there is nothing more than I hate then talking with strangers and selling shit but a guy has got to do what a guy has got to do.

So yesterday, we found some sterling silver utensils which we forgot about on a frequent basis. We usually discover them when we are trying to get rid of stuff. Decide to save them because they are silver and have sentimental value. Before they get tossed back into the drawer, I polish them in order to make them ready for the next time we use them. Which is admittedly rare, I mean do you really want to use silver when tossing a salad that you are going to then eat in front of the TV. It seems a bit over the top.

Which means they get polished, thrown in the drawer and promptly forgotten until next household purging event. Of course, they are tarnished and require polishing.

Any way, we found these tarnished beauties and we were faced with the question — do we keep or do we garage sale. But before deciding, I had to polish which is depressing because I hate polishing silver. So I do what I always do when faced with an easy but hateful tasks, I smoked a joint, got suitably mindless for this mindless task and polished those mother fuckers.

I am not sure why. I worked really hard on this. At least twenty minutes, maybe even a half of an hour. and the results were somewhat disappointing. First, the silver on the left turned out a lot better than the silver on the right. The silver on the right, from my eyes, don’t look like they’ve been polished at all. Both had stubborn stains I couldn’t remove and the blemishes in the silver would make me think twice before bringing them out for Thanksgiving Dinner.

Which brings me to my question. Why does anybody uses silver? It doesn’t look all that great and it is difficult to take care of. Stainless steel is much cheaper than silver and much easier to clean. I could have washed all the dishes from a 4 person dinner in the time I polished these 4 utensils and 2 of them, in my humble opinion, still look like shit. What a waste of time.

If I have any say in the matter these are going into the garage sale. My judgment on polishing silver is don’t.

By on

I know it is hard to believe but I am an experimental type of guy. This means I occasionally, while cursing out my household chores, think is there an easier better way to do this. So, I try something. Most of them are failures but nonetheless important information to learn as you can now skip that particular household experiment. So not all a loss in hearing about and you get to know me a little bit better and who wouldn’t want that.

So my experiment this week was trying to fill my water bottle with one hand and wiping the counter tops with my other one. I can report to you that it was a complete fiasco. It is difficult to both hold a bottle, especially one with a small entry way, under the tap and vigorously wiping the dirt off of counter tops. It is like trying to tap your head and pat your stomach at the same time. Every time you check to see how the counters look, you unconsciously move the bottle away from the tap even with 40 to 60 percent focus I was giving it. Any time you would have gained by the dual approach you lose when you go over the missed spots on the counter top and wiping the water off the bottle. So you can mark this one off of your to do list.

I know that some of you are asking why wipe off the bottle before putting it in the refrigerator, nobody will ever notice. Well, not at my house. A certain someone will discover my crime and want answers. I just don’t have a good enough reply for why I didn’t wipe the water off the bottle before putting into the refrigerator. I mean how weak of an argument is I was too lazy to do it and I thought I could get away with it without anyone noticing. Take my word for it — it is really awkward position.