I store paper grocery on top on the fridge. I use them for trash receptacles throughout the house.
Never get auto repairs done on your car at the dealership. They over charge you.
Stuff like that.
I don’t eat meat loaf or anything with mayo in it from a restaurant or grocery store. Cause Mom said not to.
Sushi was before her time but I think the same advice applies.
Growing up in Canada in an immigrant European family, there was a strict house rule that no shoes were allowed inside.
As an adult, I do the same. When I come home, the shoes come off and I put on sandal-like slippers. Not because I care about outside germs covering my floor (if you ever come to visit me, you are welcome to keep your shoes on), but because I don’t find wearing shoes during all my waking hours to be comfortable.
Buy Crest toothpaste.
Houseclean on Saturday morning.
Wrap the compostables in newspaper.
Many recipes I have in memory, thanks to my mother.
Most of my cooking can be more than a little experimental, but the basics, I follow my Mum.
She taught Home Economics at a high school level, so she’s quite reliable, even if the meals were a little bland.
When the subway train is leaving the stop before your stop, get up and make your way to the doors. You don’t want to have to negotiate sardine-packed crowds when you have only a little time to get to the subway car’s exit. Get to the exit between stations and be ready to leave before the train gets to the station. Don’t stay seated until it does. (Thanks, Mom!)
A proper martini is a 3 to 1 gin to vermouth mix. In a rocks glass, with ice. Garnished with a pimento-stuffed olive. (Thanks, Dad!)
When I’m building something, like a deck, I sign one of the boards that no one will see until they dismantle the thing. It’s an old family tradition from back when the family were working carpenters.
When you go indoors, if you’re wearing a hat you take it off. No hats in the house.
LOL! I’ve done the same thing. There’s a set of back steps off the deck of our former house in Calgary that I built and that I’ve signed on the bottom, along with the date. And in order to see my signature in our Lethbridge house, you’ll have to dismantle the front hall closet, and look up … wayyyy up. [Canadians will get this.] And while I won’t call Rusty, I’ll tell you that it’s there, with the date.
Kind of fun to put your signature where few, if any, will ever see it.
ETA: That’s what my Dad did when he built our back deck in Toronto: signed the underside of a board.
Pay my bills off every month. I have loads more money and credit than my parents ever had, but I refuse to pay interest on my bills. Exceptions only for large ticket items such as home and cars, which I don’t presently have anymore.
At work one day we had electricians installing some new cable in the dropped ceiling, one guy on a ladder with his head in the ceiling, the other on the floor.
As I was walking by, the floor guy was directing the ceiling guy toward a specific cable. He said “Look up…wayyyyyy up.”
After getting no acknowledgement, he said, “Never mind, you’re too young.”
“I’m not”, I said as I strolled by. He laughed.
mmm
I am happy to report that the answer is absolutely nothing. “My parents did it that way” is synonymous with “It’s the wrong way to do it” to me.
When Dad got a glass of water, he took a glass off the shelf, turned on the tap, filled the glass half way, poured it out, filled it all the way, turned off the tap and drank.
I was never sure why he did this. Most likely it was a dust bowl thing. In Tyvan, Saskatchewan in the 1930s, there was dust all over everything and it made sense to rinse your glass before you used it.
The Great Drought ended 2 decades before I was born but I picked up the habit anyway because–that’s what you did. Sixty years later, I’ve almost broken myself of the habit.
My dad had an interesting sense of humor that I occasionally exhibit.
I remember being in the car with him while a friend followed. Each time we made a right turn, I noticed my dad used his left turn signal. For left turns he used his right turn signal. He did this for each turn. The guy following us had no idea how to get to wherever we were going.
When we arrived, my dad’s friend was all excited. He told my dad there was a short in his wiring harness, and he started to climb under the vehicle. My dad convinced him not to get all dirty, he’d take the car to a mechanic.
Thank you, thank you. I expended much mental effort in an attempt to come up with anything that I could give and answer to the title of the OP, and I. Just. Could. Not.
You stated it better than I could.
It does sound like you’re a chip off the old block!
Nice!
I spent years planting tomatoes because that’s just what you do when you’re a homeowner, you build a garden and plant tomatoes. I think I’ve decided that I hate gardening, and I won’t be doing it anymore. Sorry Dad.
My father kept his wallet in his back pocket. So I did the same for decades. And then I discovered it’s not a good place for it, for a couple reasons: 1) it makes it easy for someone to steal it, and 2) it puts a bending stress on credit cards when I sit. I now keep it in my front pocket. Much better.
There are a lot of things I do that my parents did, but mostly I don’t do them just because they did. I do them because I consider them sensible things to do: paying off credit card balances every month, cooking at home most of the time, getting much of my news from the PBS Newshour and the Wall Street Journal, waiting for sales and stocking up.
Then there are the things my folks did that I don’t consider sensible, so I don’t do them: eating canned peas, drinking instant coffee with artificial sweetener and non-dairy creamer, saving used aluminum foil and wrapping paper to use again, wearing polyester everything, cleaning out ear wax with Q-tips, avoiding using the air conditioner even on the hottest day of the year, running on “all-season” radial tires in winter in a cold snowy climate.
That leaves only a handful of things I do that my parents did that I can’t justify as rational choices: breaking dry spaghetti in half before cooking it, obsessively calculating my gas mileage after every fill-up, and using “take care” or “take care now” as a general parting phrase.
There is one thing I do just because (maybe just because) my maternal grandfather did it, even though he died shortly before I was born. I often stand and walk with my hands clasped behind my back, just as he did. Nobody else on either side of the family seems to do this. Several people who knew us both have commented on the similarity. Is there a hands-clasped-behind-the-back gene that skips a generation?
That must get more difficult, as the years go by.
I can’t think of anything really, either. I carry on some of the things they did, like not getting into debt, but many of those I had to re-teach myself through bitter experience.