I don’t mean what you use to chop down your feces, but an object that you realized only your family has and people would raise their eyebrows at. Best if said object has a sole purpose.
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.
The fact that this is a common enough occurrence to warrant a special tool for the occasion makes me so jealous of your life
This is a common occurrence at my home as well. When there’s heavy rain frogs get caught in our window wells, some make it inside, some get caught between the windows and screen. I just put on a pair of gloves, fish em out and set them free on higher ground.
Once my cat frantically came yowling up the stairs with a frog in her mouth. Set it down gently, unharmed and stared at me loudly meowing as if to say “look what I found, WTF is this? Do something about it.”
You have one badass cat.
I have a set of tongs at home with frogs for the silicone grips. Living at the beach it’s not uncommon for green tree frogs to make their way inside the doggie door.
Oh pls i’d trade my position with you instantly, I hate frogs
QLD? Toilet frogs?
This might be a dialect thing, but I’m intrigued at what one tong is? I’m in Australia and we only have pairs of tongs - like we only have pairs of pants - and I’ve never heard them referred to in the singular.
I don’t like to use ‘pair of’ for things like tongs or spectacles spectacles which are one physical item. I do it for stuff like shoes tho. I think pair of tongs is technically correct tho
Well you did write tong before and not tongs which is what was being asked. It should still be plural, even without the “pair of” bit.
The frog tong is one half of a pair of tongs yes. You lure the frog on it and catapult the fucker outside.
How often are frogs getting in?
Very often during the monsoon season. Like twice a week or so. The rest of the year, barely. Summers is for lizards.
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.
What I love so much about the whole “turning the water off when you brush your teeth” debate is how everyone is basically telling on themselves.
The ADA recommends brushing your teeth for two minutes. Do you think anybody sits there and lets the water wash down the drain for two whole minutes? Or more likely does everyone have terrible dental hygiene?
I lived with people who would have full political debates with a tooth brush in their mouth and the tap on.
Why does it matter how much I use? Agriculture uses 20 times more than I do!
Said after a tossing half their food away…
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Bro unfortunately I do belive people would be careless enough to do that.
Had roommates that when they did dishes would keep the water running instead of filling up the sink. Didn’t matter if it was even a few days worth of dishes.
I even mentioned to them about it, they said they just didn’t want to put their hands in a sink full of dirty dish water.
People really do be that senseless.
People also have a dishwasher but prefer to do dishes by hand with the water running the whole time because they think the dishwasher wastes water and does a worse job. They don’t bother to look up why the dishwasher does a worse job (it’s always because they don’t put any soap in the pre wash tray) and refuse to accept that they could be wrong.
I’ll let the water run but only at a trickle. Enough to get the suds off.
Reason being that to fill the sink with rinse water means that water then has to be drained and replaced after you’ve rinsed enough dishes that it’s gotten soapy or murky itself.
Best option is a faucet with a spray trigger, but in lieu of that, there’s ways to do it more responsibly.
Also just a reminder you can adjust the GPM (Gallons per minute) of any faucet with a different regulator. Unscrew the tip of the faucet head, take it to Home Depot or something, and buy one with a lower GPM rate. Kitchen faucets tend to have higher GPM rates, but it may not be necessary for you, so you can reduce it to something less wasteful.
I just rinse all at once at the end real quick. I just fill up one sink of soapy water. Place I’m at now has a spray toggle and I love it.
When I say they let the water run, I mean running it to scrub dishes. Start to finish has the water running full blast.
yes to both. a lot of people my age (low-mid 20s) let the water run and also have bad dental hygiene… I only ever stopped letting the water go down the drain after a few years of paying my own water bill
Lol, at the idea that people don’t think I’d let the water run for “two whole minutes”
Right. Two minutes is nothing. I live in Florida my water bill for 4 people is $50. Water conservation is the very very least of my worries.
Maybe if there was a way for me to send my hypothetically unused water over to Cali I’d care more, but.
It’s just so silly to think so little of people not brushing their teeth enough but think those same people are beyond letting the sink run.
Me, I brush in the shower so I dunno, that probably means I take 5 second showers or something.
I live alone. My water bill doesn’t even meet the minimum charge. It’s something like $3 - $10 a month with sewage as well. Living right next to a great lake can have its perks. Lots of cheap clean water is one.
??? Why is it so crazy to imagine people let a tap run for two minutes?
I see you’ve never experienced a drought
Or lived off grid where they had to pump their water, or used only rainwater harvesting.
Because that is an absurdly long time to watch water run when you’re not using it for anything. I feel like “turn off the tap when brushing your teeth” would be inherently obvious to people brushing the full two minutes.
What’s more likely to me is people brush for about 15 seconds and don’t bother turning it off because it’s such a short period of time.
I feel bad enough when I’m letting the tap run during dishes when it’s taking me a second to scrub something lol
I want a foot pedal for my kitchen sink so badly. I feel like it would save a lot of water and I’d never have to touch the sink with my gross hands I need to wash.
Ditto! Why the fuck is this not just how sinks work?
We had these sinks in my elementary school bathroom and I’ve only seen them in one other public bathroom since. I’m really not sure why it isn’t more common.
Get one of those swiveling heads with a shutoff. Game changer for sure.
feel like “turn off the tap when brushing your teeth” would be inherently obvious to people brushing the full two minutes.
If you’re used to it running, why would they have that thought? You’re making the mistake of believing the thoughts you have are commonplace. If someone doesn’t think to turn the water off after 30 seconds, 2 minutes isn’t that drastically different enough to trigger that thought.
It’s really not that long. I leave it on both as I’m brushing, and as I’m swishing mouth wash around. About 3 and a half minutes total. It’s not on purpose, it’s just because I don’t think to turn it off.
You’re wasting, proportionally, a fuck load of water
I hope you will think twice about it from now on. Not trying to be a lesson giver really, it’s just very important. The next wars are going to be fought over water and food. Where I live we have running water during 12hrs every three days, because of climate change and corruption (long story) so we have come to appreciate water, especially when it’s drinkable (it isn’t anymore, those 12hrs of running water are for other uses only).
I’m from southern California. 'Nuff said.
water is precious
Christ, I don’t even let the shower run for 2 minutes straight. I get in, wet down, turn it off and lather up. Then rinse off. Might have it on for 2 minutes total.
Shit I run that shit for 20 minutes straight. I tend to zone out in the shower
Damn. I turn the shower on for a few minutes before I get in so the water is right. Glad you’re canceling me out.
But then how do you sear the flesh from your bones?
Plus there is LITERALLY ZERO BENEFIT to leaving the water on. It’s just pure waste. If I was learning to brush my teeth for the first time, turning off the water would have been the intuitive solution.
For me at least, brushing teeth is highly uncomfortable and the brushing noise from inside my head makes it worse. Running water dampens the noise. I learned to turn off the tap most of the time but I leave it on for when I’m out of mental batteries.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/gtcZbN0Z08c?feature=shared
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Our water bill is included in the rent, the amount we use doesn’t affect it, so I could do that. I don’t because why would I, but I could.
However, on a couple occasions I have opened just the hot water tap in the bathroom and let it run for 15 minutes, doors open, to steam up the air. It was winter, very cold, and air moisture content was like 15%, extremely dry.
I leave my tap running all the time for wayy over 2 minutes. Mainly cos where i live pays for the water and they are complete assholes so i try cost them as much as possible.
That is mad. I am super conservative with the water i use but this all goes to a treatment plant
It’s not about treatment, in a severe drought there are financial penalties for excessive water use, and this is one way avid gardeners can cope.
Tap water isn’t drinkable here unfortunately
I mean, do we really need to flush with drinking water? It’s literally drinking water straight into the toilet. 6l at that for “big business” and 4 for a single whizz. And that multiple times a day.
I found myself thinking about that. I looked at the clean water on the toilet and thought, that’s the exact same water, from the exact same source, that comes out of the kitchen faucet I use to drink and cook… What a fucking waste… (water is drinkable here ofc)
I sometimes see those eastern flushes with a tap on top that you can use to wash your hands or wtv and so the runoff water goes into the flush reservoir. I thought that was a great idea but, I think recently on lemmy someone asked about something that sounds like a good idea but isn’t, and someone spoke about those toilet/sinks. I don’t remember what the issues were but at the time I thought it made sense not to use it.
Still kinda hurts flushing perfectly good water down the drain :/
I had one when I lived in Japan. It filled the tank by running water out of a little faucet and the mini sink drained into the tank. If I recall the water stream was pretty small and low pressure. It was on a western style toilet so you had the toilet bowl in front of you in the way also. It’s been twenty years ago so my memory is a bit foggy but I remember not using it for much.
A friend had the shower drain piped directly to his garden sprinkler at one point. His shower was on the 2nd floor so gravity did the rest.
I kinda want to go hmmm but honestly that’s kinda genius. I just hope he wasn’t growing food in that garden.
I actually really enjoy this idea. Thank you
My parents had a cow watering tub in the porch connected to the gutter for this purpose, but it was because the well dried up sometimes.
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.
Nornally first the capacitor and then the motor. The capacitor is there to absorb the power surge when the motor starts up.
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If you’re on single phase power, you almost always need something like a start capacitor, at least for large-ish motors. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the reliability of the grid, and moreso how single-phase AC motors work.
If that is a start capacitor, OP might actually want to shut it off once the motor is running, as they’re typically not meant to run continuously. Usually, there’s a mechanism that disconnects the start capacitor once the motor is up to speed, but it’s not strictly necessary
Pretty much all decent sized electric motors have a start up capacitor. They need an extra bit of energy to build up the magnetic fields, overcome static friction and accelerate the motor up to the operating speed.
It’s also one of the most common causes of an AC not working anymore. The capacitor has gone bad. Pay 40$ for the part and install it yourself, or pay a professional 500$.
Edit: for anyone not reading what the reply below says: there are some life-preserving critical measures you should take if you do it yourself. If you’re not comfortable, please don’t do it yourself.
It should be noted that big capacitors can fuck you up bad if not discharged properly. It’s not hard, but you do need to be careful.
Yes, definitely. I should have mentioned it. Added.an edit.
I wonder how their opa figured this out. Did he try it out and encountered problems when starting the motor? Then maybe got suggestion to add a capacitor?
He probably had some practical knowledge when doing this…
It’s not like people in the USSR we’re all uneducated or something. Like, they knew how electricity worked, same as in the west.
Man the red scare propaganda really does live on.
Engineers are needed in all modern societies, capitalist or socialist.
Engineering education was really good. I read some Physics and some Math textbooks, and they are amazing. Same goes with Chemistry.
On the other hand, History education was all about how kings and grand dukes were bad, and how Lenin was great. Same goes with Arts, Literature and Philosophy (I once stumbled upon a book that says how class warfare was among the Greek elite, Plato was bad idealist and Democrites and Aristotle were good because they comply with the Marxist Materialism. And that was in a Math history schoolbook!) Plus a lot of discrimination, children of Party members were given good grades, even if one looks for Japan in the Africa (a real case). Ethnical discrimination (Russian chauvinism) also existed, the idea that “everything was made by Russians” and silencing the other USSR and foreign nations’ achievements. We see a war in Ukraine as a continuation of this idea.
But, going back, yes, people knew knew how electricity, space travel, nuclear power and particle accelerators worked.
EDIT: mismatched closing delimiter
Reminds me of the joke I heard from the TV series Chernobyl. From memory:
Q: What weighs 2 tons, emits lots of smoke and noise and cuts apples into 3 pieces?
A: A Soviet machine designed to cut apples into 4 pieces.
“What’s big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces?”
“A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces!”
Thanks!! I was sure I butchered it.
haha I was thinking about the same :D
Video please, internet stanger?
Here you go, internet stranger: https://spectra.video/w/dre1z1tfm3KDupVCfi8MhS
No beer to power it up. It’s 8:49 PM in Lithuania and my neighbours will be mad.
Note: the capacitor says:
МБГО ¬2 20мкф ±10% 500в 1077 ОТКWhich means 20 micro-pharads capacity, rated for 500 volts.
EDIT: no markings on the motor.
EDIT2: apparently, these capacitors are still being sold.
Awesome. Very Interesting. Thank you!
You’re welcome :)
Interesting
So cool! Thanks for sharing.
This made my day.
That’s SO COOL!
Awesome…you win todays internet! goodnight!
Oh my god I love it
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.
Now this is what i’m talking about lol
The Rodent Reductors - for Raptors!
Yoga swing.
Anytime an adult asks what it is and I explain. They always - always always - assume its a sex swing.
Which, admittedly it could very well be if the wife wasn’t so damn unwilling.
Then why do you have a full body gimp suit next to it?
Oh that? No no, that a errrr… a yoga suit
The ball gag is for the “Ommms” not to bother the neighbors …
I was like “oh what is the last word going to be?!”.
Which, admittedly it could very well be if the wife wasn’t so damn unwilling.
And here I am, being told by my wife that I will need to add tie-down rings to the bed I designed for us.
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’.
EDIT: I know contamination isn’t t actually a thing but keeping a separate cat fork is a victimless crime ok?
We got an egg folk, bowl and sponge. Mum hated things that touched eggs to touch anything else.
I’m learning that my household had a shit tonne of weird things
I use a regular fork when mashing dog food, and the fork goes directly into the dishwasher afterwards. I can’t fathom what kind of cross contamination that would lead to.
The dishwasher gets pretty hot and does a good job sanitizing
We have a cat fork too! It even has a special place it lives next to the sink
Cat fork people unite!
I’ve always called any fork that doesn’t match the set the “dog fork”, since when I grew up this was basically why we had the smaller, weird fork for our dogs and cats.
I’ve not had a dog since I was a kid, but any time my wife has accidentally brought cutlery from her work place that ends up in our drawer, I call it the dog fork.
This is how religions get started.
We have a similar spoon for dog food. My wife wasn’t paying attention and it got ripped up in the garbage disposal several years ago. It is easily identified by its jagged edges.
I’ve got a spoon and some measuring cups just for the cat food too!
If your cat food is disgusting, you’re buying bad cat food. For the love of cats, start feeding them decent stuff, please.
The food is fine and they go bananas for it so who am I to judge? The disgust is wholly my own.
Oh damn, that just unlocked a memory, we had the same thing when I was a kid
You are lucky. My mom used the same dishes we used ourselves for the cat food and would rinse them off in the sink with a sponge. And she used a different dish every time so no bowl or plate in the house was safe. Made me feel icky eating dinner out of a cat food bowl but she thought I was strange for caring.
Enamel is non-porous afaik so you’re completely safe. That’s one of those natural human responses that’s actually unwarranted if you consider modern materials (and the fact that cat food is really just meat)
Try not buying paté and use chunks or slivers instead. Also pet food is made with the meat from stores like Walmart that was getting too close to the expiration date. It should be totally safe for humans to consume and doesn’t have a risk of contaminating you and making you sick.
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.
Is there a political drama on your family, would love to watch it
One brother doesn’t share or give up decision making well. The roles are intended to be project manager rather than dictator; the person is still expected to solicit opinions and delegate tasks to others. He gets frustrated really quickly when he doesn’t get his way entirely and will get to a point where he doesn’t hear other people’s perfectly reasonable views.
But it’s been this way forever, it’s his personality. He knows it. A few of us are pretty good at calling attention to his behavior in a way that he doesn’t feel attacked by and he’ll chill out. One just goes toe to toe more aggressively with him and that tactic works sometimes too.
How much shit does your family go through that you need bylaws and a treasurer?
Probably the one reality show I’d watch.
It would be very dull. Lots of spreadsheets and bulleted agendas.
Just a big family that lives all over the country, sometimes world. We all want to stay close and this is what works for us. We maintain very low levels of shit and would like to keep it that way.
The middle brother i take it?
Youngest brother, second youngest overall.
Interesting. Our family does the exact opposite of this
I thought you were bringing the potato salad!?!?!
You walk back in from school/work and find out extended family decided to drop in unannounced?
Sounds like you’re two steps away from filling timesheets
Your family sound like a corporation.
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.
I have a car clock pencil, it lives in my car sunscreen pocket and it’s used twice a year when the clocks go forward or back.
Maybe not for every room but I have been using moca over coax and it is way faster and more reliable than Ethernet over power.
As long as your house has decent rg6 coax, I had a place with rg59 and those moca adapters worked like shit. Also make sure that filter is in the right place!
Check out a short power plug cable, been a lifesaver for those bulky power blocks.
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.
Ours has a magnet and is stuck to the toaster. Long since abandoned since most cants with ridges don’t like to open well without just using a can opener and removing the whole can lid.
It gets too hot if if I leave it attached, so I use a non-magnetic one which sits loosely nearby.
I had a (well, several) toasters that didn’t pop so well in my early travels through life and people would go crazy if I did this without unplugging it. Lol. I’m not raking the fork across the elements and the element is off, so…
Anyway, one of those disposable, wooden chop sticks works well for this and keeps people from thinking you either have never heard of electricity or have a death wish.
You can carve a little notch on the end if we’re talking about a toaster oven (like a crochet hook).
That’s not weird, that’s just smarter than the rest of us.
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.
I like this. Beats a poop knife any day.
Awe, and it’s so respectful to the bats, too; it’s sweet to hear.
Bats are babeys
And they keep the dengue fever away.
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
In case you are unaware, “poop knife” was a reddit r/confession post from a few years back that went viral, where someone admitted their family has a knife kept in the house specifically for when big ‘movements’ wouldn’t flush, and he had just discovered that wasn’t a normal thing everyone just has at home when he needed flush assistance at a friends house.
I may know the poop knife family, unless there are 2 of them.
I am aware of a poop knife being used in north Houston.
Oh boy, why does this make me uncomfortable to know there are more than one poop knife families.
The original story may have created some copycats?
Ancient story on my part, I forgot about it since I was a kid. A huge family and the most of the family was not petite which I thought was hilarious at the time. I think they had 10 kids with one bathroom, it was probably a necessity.
You ever read the cumbox guy’s piece? That guy was understated comedy gold.
The coconut was the best
Ahhh right!! A penis beaker!!
You ever drive down a rural road, and out the window you suddenly come across an old shuttered up house? The kind of house with five cars parked on the front lawn in various states of disrepair? With overgrown bushes pushing into the peeling paint of the wooden siding alongside a giant novelty bigfoot that seems to stare at you as you zip by down the road? The one with the chain link fence that’s torn in five places and yellowed trailer up on blocks? The one with a dog tied to a post, barking it’s head off outside, so you know someone actually lives there?
I imagine these threads are like a window into the lives of the people in those houses. It’s like they’re living in a whole different society, with their weird quirks and vaguely unsettling rituals.
Funny this is pretty close to the truth when it comes to the things described in this thread.
Poop Knife - Bad diet, large BM’s = financially poor diet = trailer Frog Tongs - trailers tend to have bad gaps in windows Etc
Hahaha no it’s just the monsoon.
You talk like a book 😘
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It’s a reference to an old reddit post. In the post, the OP explained they had a knife at their toilet for poop that got stuck, hence the poopknife. It was only later in life when they asked a friend for their “poop knife”, when they discovered that nobody else has a knife like that and how weird it is.
I shall take that as a compliment
I want to believe this is all /s but I haven’t gotten the feel of Lenny quite yet.
Wife and I have since established the crotch blanket ™. 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 on something better than “crotch blanket”.
A pillow should be used here as I do
The ‘leg pillow’. aka the shittiest pillow in the house to be dedicated as a between the knees pillow
I have found my people.
The real question is if the sex pillow and the knee pillow can be the same
you mean the cunt cushion ?
Hundred percent. No pillow case required
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.
Like make a hole in it?
They use a special bit for dishes. The dish bit destroys the dishes so you never have to clean them again!
It’s an option.
But not the one fate had in mind
Options == Life
Then he fucks it
Is it something like the Drill Brush? https://www.amazon.com/Drillbrush-Bathroom-Surfaces-Scrubber-Cleaning/dp/B01MRLZ43B. I have some of those and haven’t tried them on dishes, but they work great for cleaning grout.
Aren’t you worried about getting the drill wet?
Yep, everyone is some how freaked out over water damaging a $20 drill. It’s 12v, I can lick that voltage if I wanted. The only down side is splash back at full power.
By “aren’t you worried about getting the drill wet?” I was more concerned about damaging the drill. I guess it makes sense you’d use a cheap drill for it.
I sometimes use the drill for the hand cranked coffee grinder when I’m late and forgot to grind coffee the night before.
To be fair we own a coffee grinder but we use it for grinding dried chillies.
After an earlier Lemmy/reddit comment, im buying a second electric coffee grinder for Dried Mushrooms and Chillis.
What is this poop knife everyone is referring to
An old tale from reddit about a family that kept a butter knife in their toilet to dismantle the larger logs so they wouldnt block up the bog when flushed.
OP got a reality check when a friend using the toilet enquired about it and discovered that many people do not have a ‘poop knife’
No, no, it was hung in a closet. They shared it between multiple bathrooms.
Something to chop up a large and/or stiff poop so it will flush properly.
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.
No need to look at your user name to know you’re from australia
But…but I thought they ate gumdrops…
I have a tongue scraper that I keep in the shower. It is used exclusively for scraping dead skin from my heels.
It looks like this one.
Well now I know what to do with the other one
I have this exact same thing! My dentist reccomended it to me because I drink way too much coffee, which apparently causes like yellow orange film to form on your tongue
Huh that works?
