Timer

There are a bunch of everyday tasks around the Mild Home that require waiting some amount of time. Say I put want to put something in the oven, I need to make sure that I take it out after a set amount of time. I mean, bad things happen if you leave food in the oven for a long time. If you're lucky, it's just inedible; if you're unlucky, then the smoke alarm is involved.

Quite a few of them involve food (steep the tea for X minutes, uncover the pot after Y minutes, etc.), so that should come as no surprise. However, I recently had to use baking soda and vinegar to help unclog a sink. As I discovered, you don't just dump those things down the sink. You wait 5-10 minutes after mixing those ingredients in the sink, to let them do their thing. Otherwise, it just fizzes for a bit, and nothing really happens. In either case, I needed to wait for a set amount of time.

Now, when it comes to setting a timer, I have a few options. There are timers on the stove and on my cell phone, and both work equally well. However, it gets a little trickier if I have to leave the oven on for 20 minutes, but I have to turn the contents of a tray after 10 minutes. Sure, I could set the timer for 10 minutes, turn the food, and then set another timer for 10 minutes. That's a perfectly valid solution, and it accomplishes the goal. However, it takes a few extra steps, so there's always a nagging sense that there is a better way.

This is where my use of phone games has become helpful once again. I've discovered that it may take be a while to complete some quests, but on one of those games, it takes me roughly 5 minutes to complete a match. It's not precise to the second, but on average, it comes out to about 5 minutes. In essence, my brain knows that waiting 5 minutes is a solved problem.

So, if I want to wait some multiple of 5 minutes, I really just have to play my phone game a few times. This is especially useful since I rarely need more than about a 10 minute wait (if I did, I'd walk away and do something else while I waited).

Remember that scenario about having to turn the food in the oven? That simplifies to turning on the oven, sticking the food in, setting a timer for 20 minutes, playing my phone game twice, turning the food, then waiting for the only timer I set. It cuts out some steps, so I don't have to fiddle with the stove twice, nor do I have to wait for two different timers. And since I was likely going to play at some point anyway, it just makes that use of time more productive. All in all, it feels like a win.

I have to say, I'm highly amused at this turn at events, since I never thought I'd be using a phone game as a cooking tool. Still, the proof is in the pudding, so I'm going to keep doing this. I'm probably going to chuckle every other time I do it, too.