With the Internet at our fingertips flooding our screens with random information day and night, we can learn things we never knew we needed to know. Some things we’d probably rather not know, like the personal lives of celebrities and presidential candidates. Some things are inconsequential to our lives and not really worth adding to our already overflowing memory banks, like how many times squirrels mate in a lifetime or at what temperature water boils, because we already know that the yard is overrun with the little rodents and a watched pot never seems to boil even on high but boils over if you walk away.
There are a few things I’ve learned recently – things that somehow escaped my attention or were never shown to me in the past fifty years – things that are truly helpful, although not necessary. After all, I did survive all this time without knowing these facts. But maybe your life will be a little easier knowing them.
When I bought my Subaru in 2015, I was searching the handbook for the oil change schedule and came upon an obscure fact that even my car loving husband didn’t know. On the gas gauge, there is a little arrow (either on the right < or > left side) next to the tiny picture of a gas pump that indicates which side of the car the gas cap is located. Now I don’t know if this is a fairly recent addition to the display model but it is certainly a welcome insight. I can’t tell you the number of times over the past decades (when filling someone else’s car of course. I usually remember my own) that I’ve had to get out to check for the gas cap after pulling into a gas station. Never again! Yippee!
Another piece of useful information, one that involves the appliance in your kitchen called the range. Many people don’t use these anymore, but for those who do… beneath the oven door is a shallow drawer. If you are like me, you were raised to believe that drawer was put there for storage. Skillets, pans, whatever you’d need for quick access to the stovetop. But in fact, appliance manufacturers made that little drawer as a warming station. That piece of info is sort of like learning that Ice Cream is really a vegetable, right? You could put casseroles, hot crossed buns, or maybe even a chilly cat down there to keep warm while the rest of your meal is being cooked. How ingenious is that? Of course, they obviously weren’t very ingenious at marketing it for such a purpose, as I’ve never seen anyone use it that way. My grandmother, my mother, and I have all used it to store skillets. My great grandmother probably had a wood stove, so she didn’t have to deal with the mystery.
Are there any bits of wisdom or information that you recently learned that might help us all? Leave a comment and share!
Thanks for stopping!
Barbara