Does anything mundane still TOTALLY amaze you?

[TheLightSideOfTheMoon]

Mine is laundry.

When I lived with my parents my stuff would go into the washing basket, it would be there for days to 'make up a load' (my parents CRAM their washing machine full), it would be washed, hung up to dry either on the line or on an airer, ironed, had to go into the 'airing cupboard' for at least two days and THEN would finallt be allowed to be put away.

So about a week, possibly more, before I'd see favoutite items.

Now I do a load a day, stick it in the washing machine, stick it in the drier, put it away. That's it.

Times have changed. I know this. However, it STILL blows my mind when I'm putting away the pyjamas I wore the previous night a few hours after I took them off.

Every. Single. Time. My little brain judt xan't comprehend that a few hours ago they were dirty and now they're clean.

Am I odd?

Homo sapiens are approx 300,000 years old. For each of us to be here, our genetic line had to reproduce successfully before dying of the plague, being killed by a mountain lion, eating a poisonous mushroom or being killed in a war. That each of us is alive is a miracle in itself, yet there are billions of us.

For example, if each human reproduced when 25 years of age, you can assume 12,000 successful generations of humans to get to you.
What the actual frig?

Great thread! Agree with the Antipodean thing, went to live in New Zealand, and my mind was properly blown when I was looking at the night sky, to see that everything was upside down. Amazing!

Mine is loosely related to eggs and that's food.

I get the whole poisonous versus not poisonous. If someone dies you pass the wisdom on as a surviving bystander. It's stuff like eggs. Who saw an egg come out of a chicken's bum and thought 'I'll eat that' And then ate it but the shell was crunchy and the whole thing tasted foul. So someone thought it was worth another try if it was heated up. Just blows my mind.

And bread. All of the bits and pieces you need to do with everything to make something super yummy. Grind wheat etc. Who thought of it first? Who went to all that effort in the hope it would be edible?

Dishwasher. I thought about getting one fir years, finally did, it’s like having a maid.

Ditto for washer drier.

Ready meals. The quite nice ones. It’s like having a cook!

Central heating. My boiler went off at start of first lockdown, bloody freezing. Still grateful for heat

Basically I am really happy I live in the 21st century.

Also light days in spring makes me happy every year.

Very puzzled by how tides work, and generally mystified by the sea.

I was looking at a half moon the other day and was amazed that it just looks like half of the moon isn't even there. It was late morning time and it was still visible which also surprises me daily in winter.

You are more closely related to the green seaweed than the red seaweed is related to green seaweed or brown seaweed. They look morphologically similar but on completely different branches of the tree of life.

There's so many things in the world which make you think 'holy shit...', lots already mentioned, esp. space and air travel. As for the moon, if you are on the phone to someone thousands of miles away and the state of the sky is that you are both able to see the moon, you are both looking at exactly the same thing in live, real time. That's marvellous!

Aeroplanes.

How can something that big with the at many people stay in the air for 14 hours?!

Blows my mind

The invisible hand of markets still amazes me.

Here's a little extract from I, Pencil (a famous essay on the miracle of markets from the 50s)
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding!
I, Pencil

Absolutely James. There is no way "air"planes can fly. There are some over 5 metres long and weigh an area the size of Whales. Just not possible.

On a grimmer note, sexism. A friend once asked me where it started and I was completely baffled by that. In much the same way as someone decided to eat an egg, someone decided that women were inferior and then persuaded everybody else that was true... mind boggling.

The internet. The internet is just absolutely amazing.

Nuclear power.

The power of the human brain.

Reading and writing is a thing of wonder.

It always blows my mind when I try to imagine what my twenty times direct ancestors were like, and how they lived.

That I used to not exist, and it didn't bother me. That I remember my children not existing, and now they do.

The weather.

My Mum died before my DC were born. But both of them were inside her at one point, because I was born with all the eggs I’d ever have. That is pretty mind-blowing for me.

Also, my grandmother survived an earthquake by seconds (she ran out of the building, down an alleyway and looked back to watch it crumble to the ground). My Dad, uncle, brother, me and my DC wouldn’t be here, but for that.

@LonnyVonnyWilsonFrickett

On a grimmer note, sexism. A friend once asked me where it started and I was completely baffled by that. In much the same way as someone decided to eat an egg, someone decided that women were inferior and then persuaded everybody else that was true... mind boggling.

Yes, because in some ways you could easily see a flipped world in which women's capacity for giving birth, greater endurance, greater life span girl babies survive better than boy babies from birth, even given the same care, virtually all the people on record as living past the age of 110 are female are much less at risk from cardiovascular disease and hypertension than men, resist almost all known major diseases better than men -- would show them as the superior sex.

But being in general smaller and having weaker upper-body strength and being capable of being raped seems to have trumped that.

How babies are made.

British ATMs. You can do SO MUCH at the machine! Pay in, donate, top up your phone.

How we have made the world smaller. We can fly across the globe in hours whereas it used to take weeks/months by boat. I can ping a message right now to anyone anywhere in the world!

Insgibe someone telling you about what a smartphone could do back in the 80’s/90’s!!! No one would believe it!

That every other human has complex thoughts, emotions, memories, ambitions for the future inside their head just like me.

Any one person you see in the street, or in the background of the news, or anywhere has an entire life that i couldn't even begin to comprehend.

In the same vein - virtually every house on ever Street has people in it, living their own lives just like i am. Mental.

Cruise ships and super tankers, I mean how do they float? It amazes me every time I see them!

After growing up with a coal fire, Gas central heating blows my mind
The radiators down stairs are WARM
The radiators up stairs are WARM

The hot water is HOT

I've had Gas central heating for 25 plus yeas, and still give a little prayer of thanks when the boiler bursts into life

Computers and internet etc.

(Very basic, and missing stages out) I'm Sitting at my kitchen table, and the device in holding interprets the touches, it translates that to a command, the computer then sends a message to show the click,and make a click sound, it then tells the software that the user intended to press 't', which sends that to the CPU, which then transforms that data, sends it to the network card, which sends that character along the internet to another computer, which decides the message, and adds those characters to another webpage/database, which will then display on my screen.... In MILLISECONDS.

ALL THE WHILE, the target computer is receiving millions of instructions, my phone is processing millions with regards to messages/screen brightness/running other programs etc

ITS FUCKING MAD.

And the maddest thing? All the CPU in every device is actually doing is adding two numbers together.

THAT'S IT.

It's insane.

How some animals have such an intense sense of smell - a sense that we barely experience in comparison. Like how dogs can follow a trail of where someone has been, or sniff out things like money.

Ditto for animals with exceptional eyesight such as birds of prey.

@NotExactlyMrsCurrentAffairs @ZooeyS @EdwardCullensBiteOnTheSide
One of my earliest memories (before I was four because we moved house then) is our next door neighbour's kirchen cupboard coming off the wall. Apparently she rushed shrieking to our house and my mum went back with her taking me and my baby brother. I don't remember any of that, but I do have a very clear picture of the little square kitchen with the floor area in the middle just a mountain of broken wood, crockery and glass.
My great-grandma, aged 94 and living with her widowed son-in-law, accidentally pulled a corner china cabinet over on top of her. She was found pinned to the ground, surrounded by broken ornaments. Literally everything was smashed or chipped but she was fine! Went on to live to 100.
When I had my new kitchen fitted, I quizzed the Magnet fitters intensively about the likelihood of a wall cupboard coming down, but they reassured me that modern fixings are much more secure. I also have all bookshelves and wardrobes fastened to the wall - taking no chances here!

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