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Funny things your parents do or did... (1 Viewer)

Alf S

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I'll start.

My mom who is in her 70's and lives alone rarely watches anything other than the news on TV. She hasn't watched a DVD in a decade or more. So last week she decided she wanted to watch Manchester By the Sea with her friends. So I rent it for her and then show her what buttons to press on her Harmony remote. Very simple over all and she says she is good to go.

So a few days later I go to visit and she proceeds to ask me to help her with the TV/DVD so she says she watched everything just fine, BUT she was really frustrated by one thing. She asked me "How can I rewind the disk faster, it took forever!!" :eek::lol:

So I tell her (after laughing my butt off) that she doesn't need to do that. Just take the disc out, put in case and return. She was convinced that if she didn't, the next renter would watch and the movie would start where she finished. This all stemmed from me telling her earlier that when she pauses or stops the movie, and restarts, it will start right where she left off.

Oh boy, we had a good laugh. :)

So, have your parents done anything crazy/nutty?
 

Stan

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Going back a bit further, gave my mother the full special edition, widescreen "Titanic" VHS tapes. She was lost with technology. One of those "everything must fill the screen" people, no matter how distorted it was on her TV. And she had some pretty good equipment thanks to her boyfriend, yet totally wasted.

Trying to switch her to DVD was hopeless.

Eventually you give up.
 

TJPC

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How about further back to the late 70s? My parents had a huge console colour TV -- one of those ones that went out of adjustment if you stood in front of it and burped. I moved out of town for my first real job in another city. When I came home for thanksgiving in October my father greeted me with, "Thank goodness you are home. We have been watching TV in Black and White for a month!"
 

Stan

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My mom made a cake from scratch once. Can't imagine how to even do this, but she reversed the salt/sugar ratio, so two cups or more of salt :eek: and a tablespoon or whatever of sugar. Obviously didn't work out.
 

Mike Frezon

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My mother learned from her mother (my grandmother) an odd little habit.

When cutting up a cucumber in preparation of a recipe or salad, she lops off an end, picks it up and holds against the part of the vegetable from which it was detached. She then rubs the two pieces together in a circular motion (a slight foam is produced) and pronounces that she is "taking the poison out of the cucumber."

I now also do this each time I cut up a cucumber...as do my kids. I will be greatly amused whenever I see one of my grandkids do this and will always wonder about how many generations before my grandmother this all began.
 

TJPC

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My father smoked like a chimney. He liked to drive in the pre-air conditioning days with all the windows open. I sat behind him often and almost just as often had his cigarette butt which, he just flicked out the window, land in my lap!
 

BobO'Link

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My mom made a cake from scratch once. Can't imagine how to even do this, but she reversed the salt/sugar ratio, so two cups or more of salt :eek: and a tablespoon or whatever of sugar. Obviously didn't work out.
I bake from scratch frequently... much better than boxed.

My sister learned to cook rather late - after she married and had kids. When she was in college she decided to make a chocolate pie using mom's recipe (from scratch, of course). Unknown to her, her roommate had put salt in one of the containers on the counter - identical to the sugar container (I never found out why she did this - it just seems odd to me). Because of this, my sister used salt instead of sugar in that pie. When I asked how she could make this mistake as they look and pour differently she gave me "the look" so I quickly shut up - but laughed anyway. For the record, it's difficult to tell them apart but I wasn't going to tell her. :D

My wife keeps a chocolate/sugar mixture in an old plastic pepper container (for making chocolate rolls - my grandmother's recipe and nothing like a cinnamon roll - you use pie crust). The label has been removed but she'd never put anything on it to indicate what's inside. She made cabbage rolls one day and grabs that container instead of pepper. She also used it in the mashed potatoes. Surprisingly, it worked fairly well in the cabbage rolls and, not surprisingly, not at all in the potatoes. We all commented that the cabbage rolls tasted different, but not in a bad way, actually not too bad (my wife doesn't eat them at all) but that the potatoes were "off" (she's a good cook unless someone distracts her in the kitchen and then there's no telling what you'll get so something being "off" isn't an unusual occurrence in my house as there's frequently a grandkid being a distraction). It wasn't until a couple of meals later that my daughter picked up that container, which had been left out after preparing the evening's meal, and covered her potatoes with it as she loves black pepper and we don't use enough to suit her. She didn't notice anything odd other than the potatoes didn't look or taste "right." That's when we noticed several other dishes that evening were "off" and looked at the "pepper" shaker only to discover it was the chocolate/sugar mix for chocolate rolls! She'd been using it for over a week for meal preparation! Of course we all had a good laugh and that container now has a proper label. :D
 

jcroy

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The first time I met my grandmother, she was speaking to me in German. Apparently she thought I could speak German, but I didn't speak German at all. (My grandmother was originally from Germany but she left sometime in the late-1920s and moved to Tel-Aviv).

(Years later I found out some of my relatives from West Germany went to visit my grandmother in Israel at around the same time I first met her).

She also had a weird habit of speaking to herself in German, whenever she didn't want anyone to know what she was saying.
 

TJPC

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My grandparents and their siblings were Welsh. They spoke perfect English as well, and unfortunately for the rest of us, decided that teaching Welsh to their children in North America had no value. They usually reserved Welsh for things like slightly risqué punch lines of jokes they were telling in English, much to our frustration.
 

Edwin-S

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My grandparents and their siblings were Welsh. They spoke perfect English as well, and unfortunately for the rest of us, decided that teaching Welsh to their children in North America had no value. They usually reserved Welsh for things like slightly risqué punch lines of jokes they were telling in English, much to our frustration.

Yeah, my parents were like that. They would switch to Ukrainian any time they wanted to talk about something that they didn't want us to hear. Funny thing is they weren't from the Ukraine. They were born and raised in Canada. They learned the language, because their parents knew little to no English or were not the best at speaking it.

I always figure that they didn't want to teach us, because they wanted their "secret" language. On the other hand, maybe it was because they used to get the ruler if they spoke any language other than English while in school.
 

Edwin-S

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Fishing. One year my father decides we should do some fishing while camping. We rent a boat, go out and manage to catch a few. Well, my father liked camping but was never the "Outdoors man" type, so he wasn't really familiar with cleaning fish. While slitting one of the fish, he gets to the anus part. He is trying to cut around it and managed to put pressure on just the right area. All of sudden there was a stream of fish crap shooting all over the place.

That was the end of fishing.
 

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