Saving Soap While Washing Dishes By Hand

When I have only a couple of dishes to wash by hand I never want to fill up the whole sink with water. The problem is that if I was each dish individually I end up putting way too much soap on each dish. My former housemate Nick had a great solution.

Put a little bit of soap in a spray bottle then fill the rest up with water. When you want to wash a dish, give the spray bottle a shake, then spray some soapy water into the dish. Voila. The perfect ratio of soap to water.

How To Tie Your Shoes

If you have shoe laces that come undone this is for you. Way better than a double knot because it comes undone easily. This is hard to describe, so I'll just link to a video.

Mixing Wasabe and Soy Sauce

The way I used to mix soy sauce and wasabe was to measure out the desired amount of wasabe, pour in the desired amount of soy sauce then mix the two. The trouble with this method is that you end up with spicy wasabe chunks that make sushi eating a little too exciting for my liking.

My preferred method now goes like this:
1 - measure out the desired amount of wasabe
2 - add a small amount of soy sauce
3 - mix until you have a uniform paste with no wasabe chunks
4 - add soy sauce to your liking

This technique works well for any number of other mixtures that tend to clump.

I learned this tip from a coworker, but I forget who it was.

Improving Your Dishwasher Emptying Experience

This is one that I came up with myself recently. Still working out a bug or two...

One of my pet peeves is sorting the utensils when I empty the dishwasher. Fork, knife, fork, spoon... Such a waste of time to sort each utensil one by one. My solution is to put all of the knives in one slot, all of the forks in another slot and all of the spoons in a third slot. No sorting when everything is clean.

A problem with this is that the spoons tend to spoon and don't get very clean. My solution to this problem is to mix scooper up and scooper down in the spoon slot. Works fairly well to keep spoons separate and doesn't slow down the unloading too much.

The Best Ways To Open A Banana

I know four different ways to open a banana. One way is distinctly most effective. Another way is distinctly the most fun.

The most effective way to open a banana is backwards compared to the way that most people open a banana. Most people take the "handle" side and torque on it until the banana splits open. The better way to open a banana is to switch to the other side and squeeze the end together. The skin will split open and you can peel it like normal. I got this tip from Paul Bloudoff, a former coworker. This youtube video shows this technique in action.



The most fun way to open a banana is to snap it in half. This works best with firm bananas, and it really helps if you stomp and shout while you do it. The actual secret is to rotate and pull outwards while you're doing it. I forget who I learned this one from.

This guy does a good job but needs more drama.



This guy is going to town but I feel he's also lacking some flair.



For the record other two ways to open a banana are:
1 - The normal, handle side, way.
2 - The flick. Grab the banana by the handle and flick it away from you. Not very consistent, but definitely quirky.

And while I'm talking bananas I think that everyone should know about the banana penguin. Agata taught me this one. Thanks Agata. Goes over well with the kids.

Crushed Potato Chips

My friend Damien McCombs is the person with the most and best little kernels passed on to me. He's the kind of guy who has a slightly different way of doing things and is always thinking of ways to do things even a little more different (hopefully better). This is the little kernel that compelled me to start keeping track of them all.

There are a few food items that people crave when they are backpacking, climbing, backcountry skiing or exerting themselves in the outdoors. My cravings are mostly fat, salt and carbs. Wouldn't it be great if there was some miracle food that you could bring along with you to provide all three?

I was climbing a mountain with Damien and a few other folks. We'd been up since before the Sun came up, had a great and challenging climb and had finally hit the summit in early afternoon without a lot of nourishment along the way. Most people were grumbling about granola bars, power bars or something else equally unappetizing when Damien pulls out a bag of crushed potato chips. Everyone was dumbfounded and Damien was instantly everyone's best friend.

1. Buy your favourite kind of potato chips. Better make it a large bag.


2. Open the top of the bag.


3. Pulverize your potato chips so that they're about a tenth of their previous volume


4. I usually put an elastic band around the bag of chips to keep from having crushed potato chips distributed throughout my back pack.

This little trick has also made me appreciate whole potato chips all that much more since I'm now used to eating them in their crushed form.

Pulling Climbing Ropes While Rappelling

Rappelling is one thing that a lot of climbers dread. Often it comes at the end of a long day when you are tired and just want to get home and if things go wrong you may take a long time getting home. One of the major things that go wrong with rappelling is that you and your partner both rappel the ropes, then go to pull them down for the next rappel and they are stuck. The solution is to ascend back up the ropes, free whatever is stuck, then try it all over again (if you're lucky and it's an easy stick).

To give you an idea of how much climbers dread stuck ropes, a friend of mine makes Christmas cards with a knot coming into the view on a successful rope pull.

I picked up this little nugget from Extreme Alpinism by Mark Twight. It's not the most profound thing that I picked up from the book, but I use it pretty much every time I rappel and always thank Dr. Doom for it when I do.

1. Set up your rappel as usual and send the first person down.


2. Once the first climber down the ropes is secured to the lower anchor, have them pull the rope(s) back and forth a bit so that the both climbers can find points where the rope or knot will get stuck


3. Free the rope or knot from any sticky points and repeat until satisfied


4. The second climber rappels.


5. Pull the ropes and pray for no stuck ropes.