spicy food

When food is too spicy-hot, stir in some mayonnaise (or more specifically Vegenaise; I haven't tried it with any other brand) to make it milder.

tight socks hack

Several of my "hacks" actually involve hacking (i.e. cutting) things.

This hack works for knee socks whose top elastic band is somewhat too tight. It can also help if the socks are a little too short. But if the elastic is very tight, this probably won't help enough. If the elastic isn't too tight to begin with, then doing this may make them too loose.

Many knee socks nowadays have the top elastic band made of an elastic section that's been folded over and knit together on the inside, so that it's two layers of elastic fabric. With this kind of sock, it is easy to cut open the seam where it's knit together, thereby changing it into a single longer layer of elastic.





Right leg: original sock. Left leg: hacked sock.

door bell anger

Woken up by a door bell.
Get up, check the door thinking it's something I ordered.
Then see that it's a car seat for a baby.
First think, oh that's what Qiao ordered for my niece's baby.
I see a FedEx truck driving away down the street.
Then remember that Qiao ordered a stroller, not a car seat.
Worry that Amazon sent us the wrong item.
Check the label on the package, see that it's addressed to our neighbor, not us.
Oh! I wonder if they got our package instead?

Walk over to neighbor's house for the first time and wonder which door to use.
There's no package of ours by either door.
I choose the front door, as it has a door bell.

They've rung our doorbell before, to bring back our little dog who had dug out of the yard.
We've said hi before.
I may have given them Qiao's phone number, but I don't think we have theirs. Qiao has spoken with them briefly a few times.

Ring the door bell. Wait. Ring door bell again. Wait.
Knock on the outer glass door. Wait.
I see a dog inside through the glass of the doors, eating or drinking or something. It didn't hear me yet.
I knock harder, and the dog hears me, and barks. It jumps up on the door.
Hi there! (Nice doggy!) Tell them someone's at the door!

I can hear kids running around inside.
They've heard the door bell or the knocking or the dog barking by now, I'm sure.
I hear one of the kids say "Don't answer it!"
There are 2 cars outside the house. I'm pretty sure an adult is home.
I keep waiting. Maybe it just takes them a few minutes to get out of bed and dressed, like me.
I knock a few more times, waiting.
Waiting. Kids running around inside.
Waiting.
I decide to send them a message on Nextdoor.com instead. For F*CKS sake.
Sudden irrational anger.
(Remembering the other times I've rung neighbors' doorbells & knocked on doors, waiting in vain for someone to answer. Dammit; people not answering their doors anymore in this day and age.)
I walk back to my house, maybe stomping as much as one can stomp in flip flops.
I bang the top of the package with my fist in passing.
Maybe we should just keep the dang thing.
That'll show them, not answering their frickin doorbell.

Now I'm all riled up; certainly no chance of falling back asleep.
I send them a message on Nextdoor, from Qiao's account.
Any reply they send will go to his email, so I guess it will have to wait until he gets up to see if they've answered.
I start writing this post.

Noonish. Our door bell rings.
It's the neighbor.
I give them their package.
They don't have ours.
Not surprising. It'll probably come later in the day. Hopefully.
I wonder if FedEx will notice their mistake.

Then I remember that I can check for a reply on the Nextdoor.com page too.
They sent a reply before coming over. They didn't hear the door bell; "guess it needs to be fixed".
Great. I still don't have their phone number. I forgot to ask.
I'll ask via Nextdoor.

Half an hour later.
Zorro growls and then barks.
I check the front door.
USPS mail carrier walking back to the mail truck.
(Dithering here over whether or not to use the gendered word "mailman" even though the person looks like a man. But what word would I use for a woman?
Mail carrier. Mail carrier. Mail carrier. Say it enough and it will sound natural, I'm sure. Mail carrier. Mail carrier.)
USPS for this delivery, not FedEx.
It's the stroller.
They didn't even ring the door bell this time.

vulture effigies

We got an email at work a couple of weeks ago that mentioned "vulture effigies" being installed on the grounds in an attempt to keep the vultures away from the buildings. (I'm not clear why; it seems the Canadian Geese make much more of a mess with their droppings than the vultures. But maybe it's a different story up on the building roofs.)

I searched to see what vulture effigies look like:
https://www.amazon.com/BirdBusters-Vulture-Effigy-Vultures-Buzzards/dp/B075HLYDCG
http://www.allaboutprops.com/sales/vulture-sales2.html

Those look way more realistic than the fake owls we had in the parking lot a long time ago, but are still obviously fakes.

I forgot about the email until some days later when walking out the back entrance. A feathery thing was hanging from a tree limb. I realized it must be one of the effigies, but it sure looked like it had real feathers, so I had to wonder.

Now I've read that sometimes people hang up real dead vultures as a deterrent.

menstrual pad hack

I prefer menstrual pads that have wings. But nowadays most companies make the wings long and narrow. Those kind of wings tend to come unstuck* and then they start sticking to my skin instead. Ouch. This hack prevents that: cut a notch in each end of the wing to make it shorter on the part that folds over.



*You have to fold a long narrow flap onto a curved surface; of course it's not going to stick well that way. What are the people who design these things thinking?