This goes back over fifty years. When I was a wee tot, my mom made me wear clip-on ties to church. She’d grab my collar and force the little clip down onto it. This was not a good experience for me. One day I started playing with a tie and found out that that clip snapped open with a good tug from my finger and with a little squeeze would snap back down on my collar without any fuss at all! Some years later (early '70s) I had a big red velvet bow tie that was a clip-on. It worked the same way! I think mom resented she wasn’t the one to figure this out.
This makes my spleen hurt.
Considering they just invented (the hard way) the flare nut wrench.
Aren’t wrenches made of hardened steel–which is very difficult to cut with a hacksaw?
I got us one of these, and it’s the bomb. There’s nothing quite like turning a weekly job into an annual one. Now we have a ginormous refill bottle of Dawn under the sink, and we don’t have to think about it. It took a minute to get it working properly, but worth it.
They’re not super hard, else they would be brittle and snap when subjected to lots of force.
I still have the wrench. It’s a 23 mm, not a 22 mm:
University of Pittsburgh by any chance? That’s exactly what happened with my midterm.
Folks are gonna think that I’m making something hard to do. But I’m not.
I’ve a plow truck for my house. Big tires and I chain up all four tires. The standard practice of laying the chain out behind the tire/s and driving over them was not working. Absolute pain in the ass.
It’s easier to just get a bottle jack, and just jack up one tire at a time and drape the chains over from the top. Hook the chain up and get it properly adjusted.
Oh, it’s still a pain. But easier and less frustrating in the long run.
That’s how we eat them. If you fill the hole with Worcestershire sauce, it really improves it.
This reminds me of a coding task I had back in my early software development days. I had to loop through an array of objects and if a certain condition was met, delete that object from the array. (This was before collection classes made this kind of stuff really easy.) I couldn’t use a regular for-loop because the end condition (length of the array) would be constantly changing as I deleted items. I tried different approaches to keeping track of the array length, different looping strategies, when the obvious solution hit me: start at the end of the array and iterate backwards, so that if the array length changed it didn’t matter.
Couldn’t you have also poured out the water used to clean the downstairs bathrooms, carried the empty bucket upstairs, and refilled it in the upstairs bathroom? Or was it too large to get under the tap?
I eat mine ripe enough that the peel comes off. I cut them in half and then pull off the peel (unless I just eat them out of the peel). The pit comes off one half when the halves are separated, and I either cut the other half off the pit or scoop the pit out with a spoon. It never occurred to me to try to stab the pit out with a knife, and I was very confused at first when I started reading about people injuring themselves when preparing avocados, until I found out how that was how some were going about it.
There are a few varietals of avocados and some lend themselves to peeling better than others.
Well yes, it would have been too large to get under the tap. It was one of those big yellow janitorial mop buckets with wheels and a big wringer with a handle. You pretty much had to fill it with a hose.
We filled them at a “mop sink” in the back room of the store. There there was a faucet with a big bottle of concentrated cleaning chemicals attached. When you turned on the faucet it would dispense water mixed with the proper ratio of cleaning chemicals through the hose. So the main reason I was thinking I couldn’t refill the bucket upstairs was because there was no source of premixed water with cleaning chemicals up there.
everybody I know does it that way … and I live in an advocado country…
my take … I was young … donno 13,14 or so years and started programming in basic (in the 80ies, on the countryside with next to no literature, all as selflearned )
I wanted to make the word “THANKS!” scroll at the bottom of the page from right to left … and managed to do this - but the pesky “!” stayed behind … so every position the word scrolled to the left, I got an extra “!” on the screen left behind. …so I wrote a lenghty routine that would go to a certain cell on the screen and delete the superflouse"!" … but it sure was tedious as hell, dumb and inefficient …(that much I knew)
took me a long time and was a lot of code for very little benefit.
its late night already - I got the replacdement routine done about half way and go to sleep … wake up a couple of hours later to a yell of mine …
walk over to the computer, replace the:
“THANKS!” with
"THANKS! ", delete the long wided replacement routine and go back to sleep.
felt like a million bucks when I woke up the next day.
you don’t really stab the pit … you flat-smack it with the sharp edge of the knife, and then sideways wiggle the knife (which is jammed/stuck in the pit) to break the pit lose from the flesh of the avocado.
Hard to hurt yourself, as you don’t even have to hold the half avocado with your other hand …
Ah.
That wouldn’t surprise me. They don’t grow around here, and we may well only get a couple of varieties in the stores.
Makes sense!
People seem to manage it, though.
– apparently they know the knife part, but not the “don’t hold it with your other hand” part.
And it still seems to me harder than removing the pit either with your hand or with a spoon.
No, it’s a breeze. You just bring the knife down as though it were an axe and then twist. You want to use something like a chef’s knife with some heft behind it.
It can be difficult to get an avocado pit out using your hand or a spoon without mashing up the surrounding avocado in the process.
If you’re making guacamole that’s fine, but if you are trying to make avocado slices it’s not desirable.
In any event, to avoid injury when I remove a pit with a knife, I keep my other hand out of the way completely. A quick strike with a sharp knife, a twist, and the pit pops right out, usually still stuck to the knife.
+1
and 9 out of 10 times the pit comes out completely clean and still on the knife
It’s a breeze to hook it out with my thumb or with a spoon. And no need to haul out the chef’s knife for something that doesn’t otherwise require it.
I like avocado but am not much for guacamole. Avocado slices are what I’m after; but I’ve never mashed the thing up significantly getting the pit out.
Maybe this, like the peeling, is a matter of us getting different varieties? Maybe it’s harder to get the pit out of some than of others, even when they’re ripe.