I went back to my hometown to visit my parents some time back and happened to run into my old Home Ec teacher from middle school… She had retired several years ago and didn’t recognize me from over a decade before (there’s a constant flow of 12 year old brats going through the schools) but I recognized her and said hello and that I remembered her class.
Suddenly I remembered something that I learned from Home Ec.
No… It wasn’t sewing, how not to leave the oven on, or how to make a shopping list.
It was food safety.
I remember my dad, a lifelong chef hobbiest (cooking a specific stock for stew for 3 days straight, being angry at the ceiling fan because it made his fettucini alfredo coagulate strange… etc… etc…) making burgers out on the grill. He took the raw burgers off a plate, put them on the grill, cooked them then put them right back on the plate with the residue of raw burger juice. I stopped him in time… Swept in to the rescue in a manner that my Home Ec teacher would be proud of. “Stop! Don’t put that back on the plate!” as I grabbed a paper plate and replaced the e-coli cesspool plate and gingerly moved it off to the kitchen sink as if it held the bubonic plague.
After explaining what I’d heard in class the week before he slapped his forehead and went “Ohh!! That makes sense!”
I’m not calling him stupid, I myself would probably not known about this danger except for having learned it in sewing/not leaving the oven on/grocery list class… And probably saved myself and my parents from years of occasional bouts with the runs.
So, what other random “Ohhh… That makes sense!” type things have you picked up years after you should have?
I never knew you had to clean a chimney, or it would eventually catch fire and burn down the house. In my defense, we hardly ever used the fireplace when I grew up, and I don’t recall it ever being cleaned. I knew of chimney sweeps, but I suppose I never connected it to anything really important. Like, maybe people clean their chimneys for the same reason that they wash their cars: It looks better, but isn’t actually essential.
I found out about this when a friend-of-a-friend’s house had burned down after their chimney had caught on fire. I guess they didn’t know, either.
I remember being given a tour of someone’s house in Arizona, and noticed that they had a picture hung over their bed. At that point I realized one of those "everybody-does-it-and-you-never-thought-about-it-consciously-before moments.
All of the people that I know would never do that. Living in earthquake country, hanging a GLASS picture (or anything other than a soft wall hanging) over your bed is a definite no-no.
I had some friends who got a nicely photo of family ancestors, framed in glass & brass, from Grandmother as a wedding gift, which they hung on the wall above their bed. In the Midwest, not earthquake country.
But they were a young married couple – energetic & horny.
That photo got knocked off the wall one evening, smashing the glass on the headboard, spraying shards of glass over the bed, and scratching the photo.
You try explaining to your elderly Grandmother just how the picture fell down and now you need to get a reprint of the photo!
And actually, Grandma figured out quickly just what had happened, and secretly found it very amusing. As she told the rest of us later, “I couldn’t laugh, because that would have embarrassed them, but I had such a time to keep a straight face. Watching the action in that bedroom was probably the most excitement those poker-faced German ancestors ever had.
Still, if they keep that up, they’ll soon have children, and be too tired to knock pictures off the bedroom wall. Then the children will be the ones knocking things down.”
We were all laughing our hesds off at Grandma telling this story.
I wonder sometimes how my boyfriend has managed to avoid burning his apartment to the ground, because when I moved in with him I removed so much dryer lint from his dryer filter that I could’ve made a shirt out of it. The filter was STUCK, it had so much lint all over it.
I pointed this out to him and he seemed mildly surprised, but not alarmed.
THIS LEADS TO HOUSE FIRES!
I’m still the only one who does it.
[hijack] Why is dryer lint always some shade of blue? Regardless of what color your laundry is?[/hijack]
It is blue because the atmosphere causes short wavelengths of light to scatter more than long ones. As a result, blue (which is on the shorter end of the color spectrum) is scattered throughout th… Oh… Lint. You wanted to know about lint. I have no clue. Mine is kinda grayish bluish whitish with specks. I always assumed it was because of all my pairs of jeans and blue undies. I like blue undies.
As for common sense things that I should’ve known but didn’t… I’m not sure, but my father learned the hard way that an entire jar of marshmallow creme is not an acceptable snack. Oh, and now that I think about it, I had been eating sunflower seeds whole for ages before I learned that it can seriously stuff up your plumbing.
I lived with my brother when we were both in our twenties, and always nagged him about cleaning the damn filter when he did laundry. One day he turned to me in great exasperation and said, “Julie, I don’t care if there’s lint on my clothes!” :smack:
My grandma tells the story of how she stripped down one day and went to clean the shower stall with a mixture of bleach and ammonia. Apparently my grandpa found her unconscious and dragged her out. (I believe there’s some exaggeration in this tale, but the point is, “don’t mix bleach and ammonia or it will cause you to picture your grandma naked!”)
This happened to me once. I was staying at someone’s house in New York and I just couldn’t get to sleep. I just felt really uneasy and unbalanced. It took me a while before I realized that there was a large heavy bookcase looming right over the bed.
Just not the sort home design a Californian would ever have…
My grandfather, when he was handsome young fella’, recently married to grandmother no less, had a bit of an accident on the farm. While operating some heavy farm machinery (corn picker, maybe? I can’t remember at the moment), a rock/corncob/Jimmy Hoffa got caught in between some rotating blades, wedged perfectly so as to bring the machine to a halt. Grandpa decided that it would be too much trouble to turn off the machine. Besides, Jimmy Hoffa wasn’t wedged too deep in, he could just reach in and yank it out rreeeaaalllll quick like. He’s lucky all he lost was his right hand.
If you ask him nicely, he will take you out back and show you where he buried it. As a joke, apparently he used to go out to the grave and add water and fertilizer so he could grow himself some fine hand bushes.
I don’t know if this was a case of not having the common sense knowledge beforehand or just the reckless abandon of youth. Probably a bit of both.
Blowing on a cut or on a splinter digging needle you’ve “sterilized” in a flame. I mean, who hasn’t, right? You get a cut, and for some odd reason, it feels right to blow on it. You wash it, you put a little alcohol or Neosporin on it…and then you blow on it again before you put the bandage on!
Which, of course, introduces new and exciting colonies of bacteria from your filthy dirty mouth onto your nicely cleaned cut! STOP IT!!!
Oooohhh… :smack:
And I still catch myself doing it sometimes, even though I now know better.
One of my history professors in college was a little loony. One day he was telling me about how his wife was away on business, leaving him to fend for himself for meals. But he found an easy, convenient solution: he made a pot of stew and simply left it on the stove. When he wanted some, he just heated it up. When he was done, he just turned the heat off and left it there. He did this for several days. He had no idea you were supposed to refridgerate that shit. Yum-o! I hope his wife never left him again or he probably would have ended up dead.
My brother did this one time at a restaurant he was working at and he almost died…seriously. If his buddy hadn’t been there and immediately rushed him to the hospital, he never would’ve made it.