On Parents, Children and the Time Between

Waking up, I sometimes have the weirdest of thoughts. Today, I was thinking about the awkward situation my parents must be in. They've had two babies and now we're both officially adults. Those little kids went from fragile babies to fully grown people in an instant!

I remember that time felt a lot slower when I was little and somebody once told me that time will seem to go by faster each year. So by the time I'm at my parents' age, a year won't feel like a lot anymore. I remember that I used to think that a year is an almost endless period of time. Lately, it feels like the year has barely begun and then it's already halfway over! A day that used to have a lot of room for all kinds of activities feels like a very limited bundle of hours now. Thinking about this from my parents' perspective, my brother and I must have grown up ridiculously fast. One moment, we've been tiny little creatures that didn't really know what they were doing, and then the next moment we've gone to school and graduated. And while we were away each day for several hours, we've grown up just a little more every day, unnoticed. 

As a child, time felt like an infinite resource to me. I just did what came to my mind when I was home from school and helped my parents here and there. Later, I started thinking about time as a precious treasure and thought about what would be best done with my time. I've spent so many hours thinking about what I might want to do that I often went to bed, having done nothing that day at all. While it might be a good thing to collect ideas and decide what to do, it clearly is not helpful to spend all the time available on finding the very best thing to do right now. I've learned that the hard way, yet I still catch myself doing exactly that over and over again. 

Actually, while I'm writing this, I'm thinking about what I might do with the rest of my day. Yet, I'm doing something while thinking which isn't completely useless, so this is not time wasted, right?

About the Black Holes Inside the House

Everybody loses a few of their belongings every once in a while. While almost every sort of item that can be moved will get lost at some point, there are some that disappear particularly often - socks, hair elastics, pens, cellphones, keys. Why that? Well, one might say this is due to the fact that these are handled pretty often and that this might lead to forgetting to place them back to where they were taken from or that they are small enough to disappear among other stuff. But that would be too easy. 

The truth: there's a magic black hole in every house. And it seems to be located right below the washing machine. 

You might be shocked at this realization, but don't worry, there must be a fix for it somewhere, right? Right. So here are my tips for minimizing the amount of items that get lost in daily life. 

Take some sort of clip to join the two matching socks right when you get them off your feet. In a bigger household, you might also want to consider a seperate container for collecting the used socks and washing socks only among other socks to prevent them from getting lost inside a shirt or pillowcase. 

Buy the same socks multiple times. Well, this isn't as much about preventing them from getting lost but rather a quick fix in case one sock got lost somewhere or a sock had a hole or something like that. This way, you can match a different pair of socks from two socks that lost their mate. 

Have a distinctive place for every sort of item. Like hair elastics. Keep them at one spot and force yourself to put them right back as soon as you take them out of your hair. This is easiest if you have that collecting spot at a place where you usually take them on and off, for example in front of the bathroom mirror or on the bedside table. You can set up multiple spots for the same sort of item too and distribute the items evenly every once in a while when you run out of them in one spot. 

Don't ever put your phone to silent mode when it is not required. That way, you can simply call your own phone and listen to where it rings if you can't find it. There are some apps doing the same job, too, telling you where your phone is at the moment from another device. Certain keychains will light up or make a sound when you whistle, so if you keep losing your keys, this might be a good investment for you. 

And lastly and most mighty: ask mom. An item is only lost if mom can't find it. 

Why I love and hate Video Games

As a person who has grown up with tons of different video games, I of course do have an opinion about them. During my childhood, I've been playing various video games on different consoles and I've also had a phase in which I was constantly playing flash games. I loved video games so much that I decided to program my own once I'd be an adult.

I've never actually been addicted to playing, I just enjoyed it and I loved the fact that I could be anything in a game - be it a cute little dragon, a professional photographer or a brave hero. When I got a bit older, I started to enjoy the Animal Crossing series a lot because I didn't have to be anything, I could just dwell in this virtual world, visit concerts, go fishing, decorate my house and design new clothing. 

But among all the joy I've had while playing video games, there has also been that dark side, too. Every now and then, just like today, I've been thinking about my life and what I'm doing with it and I always came to the conclusion that video games are a huge waste of time. 

While I might be a super rich tradeswoman in a video game, all I effectively did to achieve this was sitting on the sofa or lying in bed holding a handheld console and staring at a screen. 

I always kept wondering in those moments what my life would be like if I had never been introduced to video games. I could have spent so many hours doing so many more interesting things that might have made me happy. More happy than any game can. I probably would have gone outside a lot more often, I would have met other people more frequently. But those games and apps and the internet in general always kept me inside the house, wasting my time watching movies, playing games, searching the internet for how to be happy. Isn't it ironic?

Getting Melted Plastic off the Stove

I messed up in the kitchen today. While cooking, I placed the plastic spatula beside the stove and it slid onto it unnoticed. When I saw it, it was too late - the edge of the spatula was already melted, leaving both the spatula and the stove a mess. I was pretty panicked, I mean, I just melted one pretty expencive (tupperware....) spatula and there was a melted puddle of it on the stove top..! My desperate tries to get it off while the stove was still hot were useless, it somehow didn't seem to move at all. 

So I turned off the stove, let it all cool down until I could touch it and then I tried to figure out how to get that plastic stain away from the stove. And here's what I came up with.

You will need:

* Baking soda or Cream of Tartar (some sort of chemical base that isn't going to cause damage if it ends up in your food)

* Vinegar (lemon juice should work too, since it's just an acid needed)

* some sort of hard object (e.g. a plastic spatula for a ceran stove, or a blunt knife for those ridged stove tops)

* a spray bottle

* a sponge or dishcloth

Sprinkle some baking soda onto the hardened plastic puddle, making sure to cover the edges. Fill the spraybottle with vinegar and spray some of it onto the soda. This will form some bubbles. Use the hard side of the sponge and rub over the plastic stain until you can't see the baking soda mixture anymore. Don't worry if it doesn't come off that fast, just keep repeating this and use your fingernails and a plastic spatula or blunt knife to try to scrape the plastic off the stove top. It took an hour for me to do this on one of the ridged stoves, so be patient. 

But what about the melted spatula? Well, if it smells like burnt plastic, you should better throw it away. In my case, the spatula didn't have any weird smell. So I carefully cut off all the protruding edges around the melted tip of the spatula with a utility knife and used sandpaper to smooth it all out. And it actually looks pretty exactly like it did before, except for the fact that the spatula is now slightly shorter. That was one quick fix and the spatula is working fine again. 

I hope I could provide at least some of you with a possible solution for this very nasty problem. Have a good day ^-^