Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Scratch 2

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inside and Outside

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I invested in a sewing machine during the pandemic. It was the most basic model we could find, but it was good enough for what we needed: to make a few masks. And now, over a year later, I still think that it was a good investment. Interestingly, even with restrictions being lifted a bit, we still find that we need masks. Some stores still require them, and neither of us wants to be in a position where we needed a mask and didn't have one. So, we still have to wear and wash them. And even though we've never run out of clean masks to wear, we did notice that we were close a couple of times. So, I recently broke out the sewing machine to make a few more masks. When we initially invested in supplies, we bought a pack of fabric squares. We figured we weren't going to need super high quality, and having a bunch of squares would give us options in case one of us screwed up (read: me). That also gave us the ability to add a little v...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...
Post a Comment
Read more