Asklemmy

We've got a frog tong. Every time a frog gets in the house catch it with a tong and toss it in the garden.

Bucket in the shower to collect run-off water for flushing? Thought it was standard until I learned people don't even bother turning the faucet off when brushing their teeth.

Well, if it counts, we have a homemade potato grating machine from the Soviet times my grandfather has made because he was a genius and partly because of Soviet Union. It draws a lot of energy, emits a lot of noise (seriously). To turn on, it has two buttons, one for capacitor or something, another for the motor itself and, nowadays, I have no clue which one I should turn on first, left or right... It stands on three legs and weighs around 10 kg (old transformers were heavy). It produces good results, though, despite looking odd.

We have a pvc pipe cutter that is used to cut up frozen small animals, like quail and mice, for our raptors. It works really, really well.

My parents' old place had the bat towels and the bat box.

Bats would hang out in our garden eating bugs and such. But they'd sometimes get confused, flop into the house, and get stuck. We live in a third world country, there isn't some organization we can call to properly care for the bats, but we're not stupid and we know that handling a wild animal is bad for us and the critter.

So. Old beat up towels. Toss one on the floor next to the crawling bat. It'll cling to it. Lift the towel from a distance. Gently drop it in the box. Put the box next to a tree. Bat will find the tree and find its way home.

My family has rules and positions we vote on. We're all adults out of the parents' house. We collaborate on a lot of projects and travel together in different combinations; the rules, or guidelines really, make us more efficient.

I am often travel coordinator for joint trips. Someone else handles food coordination specifically. The youngest calls meetings, usually on a quarterly to yearly cadence, and publishes the meeting notes to a shared cloud drive. Another is in charge of coordinating a Christmas gift exchange. We've rotated being financial and medical backup/adviser to the parents and those roles also comes with responsibility to update the other siblings on major changes.

The toaster bottle opener.

A metal combination bottle opener/can tapper which is kept by the toaster oven and used to pull the hot rack out to get your food.

I'm so confused by the poop knife. What in the hell is a poop knife?! WHY?!

My family is NORMAL and we have NORMAL things in the house!!! WHAT THE FUCK IS A POOP KNIFE OR THE FUCKING FROG TONGS YOU PEOPLE ARE INSANE

We have a fork specifically for cat food. It’s different from all our other forks (we bought it separately) and it’s used exclusively for ‘mashing’ and dividing wet cat food.

We love our cats and we love to give them the food they like but wet cat food is disgusting and we’d rather not risk cross contamination.

No where near the poop knife, but people are weirded out that I use a power drill for dishes. I don't have a washer and the drill dose things a rag could never conceive of.

Wife and I have since established the crotch blanket (tm). It's really just a flat sheet, but we each have our own and take them even when we travel. Keeps your legs and bits from sticking in the heat, and crumpled correctly it supports your knees while you sleep.

Not that weird as an idea, but wish we would have settled one something better than "crotch blanket".

At my parents' house, the shower bucket. At my house, the kitchen jug.

The water heater is at the other end of their house from the bathroom. My water heater is in the middle of the house, the kitchen is on the end. It takes awhile for hot water to reach their shower/my kitchen sink and dishwasher. So, in order to not just waste that clean if cold water by running it down the drain, we catch it and use it for something. I use it to water my vegetable garden.

Basically I fill my watering can from the cold water that comes out of the hot tap before I start my dishwasher.

We have a pair of tongs for fishing out stones that our youngest son (2) throws down an outside drain.

The frog tongs reminded me of my spider box. Because I think spiders are good and reduce insect population I don't kill them. Instead I have a shoebox with a piece of paper in it. Get spider on paper, they usually crawl right onto it if you hold it near them. Then throw paper into shoebox and close the box. Shoebox should seal and not have holes, btw. Most shoeboxes do not seal. Then take the box outside and open. +1 spider population in your yard.

back then, we all thought they were our normal breakfast spoons until we accidentally found photos of our roommates abusing them as sex toys

my youngest brother had a lazy stick. It was a broom handle and a ruler taped together with a couple of chop sticks mixed in to help hold the two together. To avoid getting out of bed, he fashioned this up to turn off the lights in his room. Inspired by Homers broom in the episode of the Simpsons where he gains a ton of weight to go on disability.

This stick did the trick and even could turn the tv on and off.

Twenty years later, my brother is currently on a diet and losing a lot of weight. All the weight is post stick and much later in life, but we have a laugh about it every now and again.

We have a suite of kitchen tools because sometimes walking downstairs to the garage is to far when all you want to do is measure something real quick or quickly tighten or loosen a screw.

My grandfather used to run a fauna park with kookaburras. We had a meat grinder, like what’s used to make filling for pies and pasties, which was used to grind up baby chickens and mice into a paste for the kookaburras.

They also had a meat grind to use for pies and pasties so I hope they never mixed the two.

I have an internet pencil.

Getting reliable internet through the house while renting crappy houses means I end up using ethernet over power bricks.

Every couple of months they will fail and need to be power cycled but the switches on the power point are occluded by the EoP brick without enough room for my fat fingers.

I would just grab any pen or pencil to use as my switch flicking tool but they are constantly purloined by my children so I keep a special internet pencil on my desk.

Drywall patching spade that is a stain scraper.

Many years ago, I lived with two slobs. They often left dried food on the counters, floors, and other flat surfaces (like the stove top or floor of the oven). In addition, one of them fed their dog with human food that gave it the shits, and was not attentive towards talking the dog out to poop. So the floor would have clay-like puddles of drying dog diarrhea. This scraper was used to deal with the dollop of whatever organic matter was dried onto the counter, floor, or otherwise. Then washed in the next dishwasher cycle.

"But you'll scratch the [surface material]!!!"

I don't care. My house, my problem. Clean up after yourself, for fucks sake. Plus, I was always wiping down the counter with cleansers, so any cross contamination was not a concern. I am a voracious cleaner.

Those slobs have left, the dog passed away, and the dogs my wife and I have now are mostly housebroken and don't have diarrhea. The scraper only rarely gets used these days. When she moved it, I had to explain to her what it was, though.

I have a fetch ladle and a coal spoon. My dog lives for fetch but always sets the ball next to my feet. If I'm sitting on the back porch I don't want to keep bending forward so I have a ladle that's perfect for scooping up a tennis ball and throwing it. I also have a slotted spoon that I use to grab unburnt coal out of my grill before dumping the ashes. Both of these utensils just hang from my grill.

A mop in the hallway because my dumb but lovable doggo can't take a sip without spilling most of the water onto the floor