Your life-hacks (formerly known as tips & tricks)

Not quite the same thing; the A/C unit in your house (Sorry, I don’t know all the terms) has a pan that collects the condensate from the coils and sends it (hopefully) outside via a pipe or hose. If the water backs up/the pipe is plugged, the condensate will produce happy clumps of mold that could back up into your house. The outflow pipe has a clean out with a switch in it (looks like a piston) at the exit of the ac unit; the switch is buoyant and will close off the pipe if the water backs up all the way to the ac unit. It’s a good idea to pour a quart (+/-) of bleach or vinegar down there once a month to murdalize the mold. I mention vinegar in case your outflow goes to the septic tank; bleach will kill the helpful microbes that keep your septic system humming along.

Well, duh, the same people who watch videos of professional pimple poppers, those docs who also cut and extract sebaceous cysts.
Or so I’ve heard…

Nah, they’re not the same. Sickly things coming out of humans enjoy widespread interest, I guess of the ilk “OMG! [shiver] I’m SO HAPPY I don’t have that” and various other emotions. But sink hair goop? No hit TV shows about that.

Sorry to say there’s probably a niche for that. A few years ago, pimple-popping videos were something I’d have never thought any reasonably rational person would find enjoyable to watch, but here we are.

New jar of peanut butter, the natural kind with oil separated at the top. Stirring manually with a spoon or butter knife can sometimes get messy and the results uneven. I use a handheld electric mixer on it for a few minutes - results in smooth and consistent PB all the way to the bottom of the jar (when refrigerated).

An old bicycle inner tube can be cut crosswise any time you need some rubber bands for something. One tube will last a while.

Same thing with rubber gloves. I expect the yellow elbow-length dishwashing kind works better for rubber bands than a medical-style nitrile glove.

I do the same with natural PB (by the way, no-stir PB has hydrogenated oils, a fact I wish I’d known 40 years ago). It’s a lot neater for me to dump the whole jar into a plastic quart container twice the size before beating; that way you can use both beaters for an even better blend. Nice, too, that you can dump out some of the oil if desired, though if you dump it all out you’ll have peanut clay.

A note: Hydrogenated oil is saturated fat. It’s, well, it’s not exactly great for you, but it’s not as bad as it used to be made out to be. Partially hydrogenated oil is trans fat, which is the really bad stuff.

Saturated and trans fat are similar culinarily, with both giving food the same consistency, and so it was hoped that trans fat could be a healthier alternative to saturated fat. Now that it turns out that it isn’t, everyone’s pretty much gone back to using saturated fat, so it’s basically now a non-issue.

Thank you.

Do you mean an immersion blender? Because that would change my life with NPB

No, a regular handheld mixer with one or both beaters (two works better, if they fit) on low/medium speed. An immersion blender may be over fast for thick PB.

An added feature of doing it this way is getting to lick the beaters afterward, or sharing one with your dog. :crazy_face:

thx for that!

I learned from our old (analphabetic) gardener that a bicycle inner tube (BIT) cut lengthwise into 0.5 - 1" wide strips are a lifesaver and do-it-all in gardening and outdoors …

Need to connecte something flexible to anything else? BIT is your friend … need a really strong parallel joint …? torniquete a BIT over it … 5 or 6 layers of BIT rivals any other fastening system (incl. screws), esp. in situations where screws cant be used …

the only solution I found for patching holes incl. in solid pipes (plastic or metal) … but of course just outdoors.

so if you are into gardening get yourself an old BIT to cut to strips …

Right. I saw the other posts too. What I do hve is a wooden pb stirrer from Koeze’s
Wedged chapel with a taper I twist and stir.

I have 3 jars of npb in my fridge in various states of dryness. I’ve given up.

Thin plastic shower caps make great dish/bowl covers when storing leftovers in the fridge. Saves the hassle of tearing off a sheet of saran wrap. A package of ten is less than two bucks.

But do not use them in the microwave!

When I started working from home during COVID I used to get driven crazy by the fan in my laptop churning away like a lawnmower once it got hot. So I sat it on a wire cake cooling rack. It worked like a charm and it has been there ever since. The Dell technician that came out to repair it once thought it was a great idea.

I was chopping up cooked chicken meat (thighs) to put in a sandwich wrap when I decided to crisp up the leftover skins to put in the wrap.
I put the skins in a skillet and turned up the heat, flipped a few times until crispy and crackling and wow that was a supremely tasty addition to the wrap. Kind of like bacon.

interesting tidbit (it’s not you, its me!!!)

I “mentally misread” your wrap as seran wrap the first time I skimmed over your post … just to give you the side-eye …

then I read it again, fell into the right “mental rut” concerning the word wrap … and yes, it makes so much more sense …

following through with my process of introspection: this “triggering the wrong mental rut” must be a major inroad for wrong memories of stuff one reads/read. Yes is said so, but one picked up the wrong meaning, came to wrong conclusion and stored those …

When we used to go camping we had rubber bands, made from cutting old car inner tubes across, at the ends of all the guy ropes.

If peanut butter is too stodgy, i stick it in the microwave for 10-15 seconds
which loosens it up enough to stir easily with a knife.

Never thought of that I’ll try it. But I better check the best buy dates first as there’s bound to be at least one expired jar. And one dried up jar I’ve used exclusively to bait the mouse traps with unsuccessfully I might add.

I can see how that could be misconstrued, why I needed to say wrap when I already explained it was a sandwich? Perhaps to avoid confusion or project my superior dietary selection because it wasn’t just a sandwich made from bread it was a spinach wrap from Aldi !

Those are damn good wraps btw, they hold together quite well when wrapped burrito style full of fixings and they’re not pasty or rubbery like others.