Kids, death, financial ruin, crappy jobs, hobbies that just seem to never ever end* have tought me to stop, frequently, and find the good Stuff in life.
If you just keep going from project to project, crisis to crisis, soon enough you’ll look up and find you missed all the good.
*= this seems like an odd example, but your hotrod will never be fully done, so enjoy it while it’s broke, cuz that’s how it’ll always be.
Never use an icepick or other sharp object to defrost your refrigerator. Not only does the escaping freon burn, but it stinks the house up for days. Plus the freon gets into and ruins any food that might have been otherwise salvageable without refrigeration. Oh, and you have to pay to have someone haul it away, since there’s no usable freon in it.
It’s times like that when I miss my propane refrigerator from the 20s. It froze the milk and lettuce, had less space than your average cooler, and took 12 hours to defrost, but you needed dynamite to hurt it.
If your toilet gets stopped up, and fifteen minutes with a plunger fails to unstop it, call a plumber.
And don’t run the washing machine until after the plumber has fixed it.
I recently failed to follow that advice.
When the washing machine emptied its water, it couldn’t go down the pipe, because that was clogged, so it went the other way, which led back up to the toilet.
The water carried with it various, uh, sewage matter that had been trapped on the toilet side of the clog.
Mulitple inches of sewage-filled water flooded the bathroom, leaked under the walls, and soaked the carpet on the other side.
Result: Walls and carpet contaminated with sewage. $2000 in cleanup fees, $3000 in contractor fees to replace and repaint the walls, and another $3000 to replace the carpet.
Insurance covered it (except for the deductible), but still: A few hundred dollars to a plumber would have been better . . .
Do not rent your condo out to people with bad credit. Just don’t. Because they earned that bad credit for a reason, and that reason ain’t gonna bring your life anything but stress and irritation.
When you stand up from sitting on the toilet, and there is a small box full of stuff that is to be thrown away sitting between you and the bathtub, do not face the toilet to flush it. Facing the toilet will put your back to the small box of stuff and if you don’t remember it is there, you might take a step backwards, trip over the small box of stuff and suddenly realize you are falling backwards into the bathtub and there is nothing you can do about it. You might land square on your tailbone and then smack the back of your head against the other side of the bathtub. And then while you are all dizzy and stuff you might blunder out into the hallway and lose your balance and fall heavily and then when you find you cannot get up your wife will call 911 and they will take you to the ER where you will pass out in the men’s room and end up admitted to the hospital and you won’t remember anything that happened after the ambulance shows up and you won’t know where you are until a nurse explains the entire sordid mess to you. The moral of this is, never leave a small box full of stuff to be thrown away in a high traffic area like a bathroom, especially when you are an OLD GUY who already has situational vertigo.
I have learned that while using the weedwacker for Mom, not to listen when she asks me to “get a little bit closer to where the pool used to be” because letting the head get even an inch or two over the sand hurts quite a bit…even through jeans! I also learned that pebbles flung at high speeds can leave blisters on your knees before they bruise.
On the pain-free side, I learned that if the mechanic who worked on your brakes only mostly tightened the cap to the brake fluid, in a couple of months enough evaporates to make the e-brake light on the dash come on when you take sharp turns; something that is startling in an automatic considering how infrequently that brake is used. It’s not too often you figure out that the solution to a dismaying problem costs less than $3 to fix. God bless the internet.
You can’t save people if they don’t want to be saved, and you can’t help people if they don’t want to be helped.
I’m sorry this isn’t funnier, and I’m doubly sorry it took me so long to learn this, but there you are.
On the other hand, it makes for some interesting experiences. 
My most recent life lesson is the realization that I have wild mood swings depending on my blood sugar. I have to very carefully balance my diet if I don’t want to be on a continual rollercoaster of mania, depression and near-psychotic irritability.
Sunflowers won’t flower at 12 inches tall. But they will at 12 feet tall. :smack:
So dumping a bunch of fertilizer into their pots every morning and pleading with the sunflower god to help a sister out isn’t going to do anything but kill your plants and make everyone think you’ve gone absolute bonkers.
Now I’ll be lucky if I get my flowers and their delicious seeds by Halloween.
Ok.
I hurt myself laughing at this.
If you’re in the process of packing up all of your stuff in preparation for a move, and go to your dad’s house to pick up some plastic tubs, and your sister is there with her friend, do not accept their offer to smoke a bowl of extremely powerful psychoactive herbs, and then go to Nick’s English Hut and order an elk burger and French fries and drink beer at the bar while you’re waiting for it, and then consume the elk burger and French fries in about eighty seconds, giving yourself a terrible stomach-ache.
Instead, just take the damn plastic tubs, go back home, and keep packing your stuff up.
If you push the cigarette lighter in your car in for, say 10 seconds, and then pull it out and the coils are still black (not glowing orange like they should be), do not touch the coils to see if it’s hot. There’s a good chance you’ll hear a sizzling sound and then about 10 seconds later, smell burnt flesh.
Words to live by. 
I didn’t know this! What happens? Was it dry rice that swelled in the garbage disposal?
Aww, did it hurt? I did that once (not being a smoker touching it seemed to be the only good way to figure out if the lighter worked in my new used car - paper would have caught on fire, right?) but only managed to painlessly burn the ring pattern into the first layer or two of skin. I didn’t keep my finger there for 10 seconds, though
I can’t speak for Glory but in my case, yes it was, and yes it did.
Bolding mine
Yep - that’s exactly what I was doing. Not a smoker either.
It was 10 seconds that I had the lighter pushed in, not 10 seconds that my finger was there. And then another 10 seconds after burning my finger before the smell reached me. Sorry for the poor wording.
And yeah - it definitely hurt.
It was 2 leftover containers of cooked rice from P.F. Chang’s. My boyfriend took apart the entire pipe system under the sink, but the blockage was too far down. Had to call a plumber to power-snake it. Everyone I’ve told this story to has looked at me like I was crazy “everyone knows you don’t put RICE down a garbage disposal.” Well, I do now.
Back up your documents folder from your computer. At least once a month. Keep the backup in a safe deposit box.
Turn off the main power switch at the breaker box, i.e., turn off ALL the electricity to the entire house before doing any kind of electrical work, no matter how simple. Don’t just turn off the one breaker switch that supposedly controls the electricity in the kitchen.
Chainsaws are pretty dangerous even when their engines aren’t running.
In any sale involving more than $200, the vendor is lying to the consumer. It is usually in the consumer’s interest to lie also.