Dear Steven,
How was your day? I made a ladder from spaghetti. I’ve been wanting to clean all the fallen leaves out of my rain gutters on the roof for ages now, but I don’t have a ladder. I thought about going to buy one, but I don’t want to spend $30 on something I will only use once or twice a year. So, I thought, why not use stuff I already have in my house? I pulled out everything that could be fashioned into some kind of ladder from my drawers and laid it on the bed. Thinking logically, I narrowed it down to socks, shoelaces, and spaghetti. I ruled out socks pretty quickly because I only have one pair and I needed to wear them. I have many more pairs of shoelaces, but if I wasn’t going to use the socks, I thought it would be unfair if I used the shoelaces. I didn’t want my shoes to think I favored the socks. Obviously! That left spaghetti. There I hit on the first of two problems: I only had 200g of spaghetti. When boiled al dente, it is quite strong, but not strong enough to make a ladder out of. I was going to need a lot more spaghetti. The second problem was that when I wound the spaghetti into ropes, it just slipped loose. I was going to have to let it dry. My mission began. I went to the supermarket and bought 40kg of spaghetti. I carried it home in a wheelbarrow. Then I set to boiling, winding, and drying. It took two more trips to the supermarket and 5 days, but I made my ladder. It was strong and it reached to the roof! Impressed? I was. I set it in the garden, climbed to the roof, realized I didn’t actually have any rain gutters, smashed the ladder up and watched TV.
Your friend,
Kevin