Headstones on Hilltops

The Petty and Peculiar Peaks We Defend

Protecting our Pointless Perspectives and Predilections

Everyone has a proverbial hill they’ll die upon.

Some of us have several.

Some of us have an entire mountain range constructed of nothing but molehills.

And none of them are particularly sensible. None are monumentally significant or even mildly important.

People may imagine their “hill” carries great virtue. But the truth is their knoll isn’t noble, their mound isn’t moral — and even their butte isn’t a beaut.

No one’s out here defending their stance on global child labour laws with the same intensity they bring to the question of whether the thermostat should be set to “obviously comfortable” or “clearly sub‑polar.”

But ask someone about the correct way to load a dishwasher and suddenly you’re dealing with a hydrodynamics engineer lecturing you on the proper orientation of flatware in the utensil basket and why certain items, despite clearly being marked as “dishwasher safe”, must never, under any circumstances, be included in the load.

These tiny loyalties sneak up on us. One minute you’re a reasonable adult, and the next you’re explaining — with the barely contained fury of someone who has explained it several times before — that bread does not belong in the fridge.

And the funniest part?

We’re convinced we’re the normal one.

That loading the toilet paper roll so it hangs down the front is the correct way to do it.

And that people who hang the roll down the back are, unbeknownst to them, only hours away from becoming a case file for a forensic pathologist.

But beneath the absurdity, there’s something almost sweet about it. These micro‑opinions are tiny anchors in a world that keeps shifting under our feet. They’re familiar, predictable, and — best of all — harmless.

No one’s getting hurt because you believe pineapple on pizza should earn someone a one‑way ticket to a tribunal in The Hague. At worst, someone at the table slowly sets down their fork and looks at the ceiling.

Still, these are the hills we choose.

And once we’re up there, we’re not ceding them without a fight.

The Cold War

If you ever want to see the true fault lines in a household, don’t look at finances, division of labour, or parenting styles. Look at the thermostat. That’s where the real diplomacy happens — tense negotiations that inevitably escalate into hostilities, carried out through covert, passive‑aggressive micro‑adjustments of half a degree.

Some people run their homes at a steady 19°C, as if they’re trying to overwinter carrots and potatoes in their living room. Others inveigh that anything below 22°C is “basically uninhabitable,” almost as if they, personally, have survived a winter on Pluto.

And then there are the extremists — the ones who believe the thermostat should never be touched. “Just set it to a temperature and leave it alone!” they insist, convinced the furnace will eventually throw in the towel from the emotional burden of refereeing a domestic civil war over the thermostat.

And this isn’t just a household phenomenon. The workplace is rife with employees seeking asylum from their personal temperature zones.

Sometimes it’s because the HVAC system was installed 50 years ago and now functions with all the reliability of a 1970s Communist‑bloc automobile, keeping the building mired in two completely different climate regions — a balmy, sub‑Saharan 34°C at one end and a North‑Atlantic‑in‑October 17°C at the other. Coworkers migrate back and forth like climate‑displaced wildlife in search of a more hospitable ecosystem.

Other times, the workplace designates a single person as the Minister of Indoor Climate Control, whose sole job is to roam the halls and manually tinker with every unit. They’re the ones entrusted with the tiny brass key to those wall‑mounted thermostat lock boxes — those little plastic jail cells bolted to the wall to prevent the peons from having any say in their own comfort.

The funniest part is that everyone believes their preferred temperature is the obvious, rational, biologically correct one. “This is what humans like,” they say confidently, as if they’ve conducted peer‑reviewed studies on the thermal preferences of the species.

But the truth is simpler:

Temperature is comfort.

Comfort is survival.

And survival, apparently, is worth dying on a hill for.

So we sneak over to the thermostat like spies engaged in their own private Cold War, adjusting it by a single degree and hoping no one notices — even though they always do.

They always do.

And if thermostat settings can spark a Cold War, just wait until we get to cold storage.

The Great Cold Storage Schism

Some people keep bread in the fridge, proudly announcing that it “lasts longer,” as if they’re preparing for a siege.

Others insist it belongs in the pantry, because refrigerating bread somehow “kills the soul of the loaf,” a phrase usually delivered with the wounded conviction of someone who has personally mourned a ciabatta bun.

Interestingly, the same people who insist that bread must go into the fridge will happily leave their danishes on the counter — even though, in the grocery store, the bread and the danishes were sitting a foot and a half apart like cousins in a bakery‑aisle family reunion photo.

Does anyone actually believe that when a grocery store closes, staff wheel all the bread and pastries into cold storage like they're tucking baked goods into bed?

They don’t. And yet, many of us do just that.

But bread is only the beginning.

Peanut butter.

Ketchup.

Soy sauce.

Hot sauce.

Pickles.

Mustard.

Jam.

Butter.

The list of “things that may or may not belong in the fridge depending on who raised you” is endless.

Every household has its own “house rules” when it comes to food storage — rules that make perfect sense to the people who live there and are baffling to everyone else. You open someone’s fridge and suddenly you’re staring at a jar of peanut butter sitting next to the milk like it’s always belonged there, and you have to pretend this is normal so you don’t offend your host.

Fortunately, our old friend science is here to help.

Unfortunately, it mostly serves to add more dirt to the already muddied waters.

Because technically — technically — refrigerating bread slows mold growth.

Which is good.

But the cold temperature causes moisture loss and accelerates starch retrogradation, which means the bread goes stale faster.

Which is bad.

So the choice is ultimately yours. It really comes down to whether you want your baguette to transform into a penicillin farm or a sledgehammer.

Peanut butter?

Shelf‑stable and perfectly happy in the pantry — unless it’s the natural, hippy kind, in which case the fridge keeps the oil from separating but also turns it into an unspreadable brick.

Ketchup?

Commercial ketchup is remarkably acidic — typically with a pH below 4 — which makes it an inhospitable environment for the bacteria responsible for things like botulism, E. coli and salmonella. That's one of the reasons unopened bottles can sit happily on grocery store shelves for months.

Once it's opened, though, refrigeration helps preserve its flavour, colour, and overall quality, even if it isn't strictly necessary from a food-safety standpoint for most households.

So yes, you can refrigerate your ketchup.

Or you can leave it in the pantry.

Science, rather unhelpfully, gives both camps enough ammunition to continue the argument.

But none of this matters because people often don’t store food based on science so much as habit.

It’s no different than politics and religion — what you grew up with influences your choices.

If your parents kept peanut butter in the fridge, you will too — even if every food scientist on earth tells you it’s unnecessary.

Because this isn’t about food safety.

It’s about ritual and identity.

And so the schism continues — fridge people and pantry people, living side by side, united only by their mutual certainty that the other group is deranged.

So whatever your food storage preferences are, you’re likely safe to keep doing them — because it’s pretty clear that foodborne illness hasn’t seen fit to cast you out from the gene pool.

Yet.

The Toilet Paper Orientation Crisis

You knew this one was coming.

Of all the domestic peccadilloes people endure in their lives, dealing with an improperly hung roll of toilet paper has to reside near the top of the list.

There are two kinds of people in this world, and — for lack of official terminology — I’m going to call them over‑rollers and under‑rollers.

And each group is convinced the best gift to give the other is a multi‑tool capable of tightening all the loose screws they clearly have.

The toilet paper orientation debate dates back to the late 1800s, when toilet paper itself was still a relatively new invention. In 1891, Seth Wheeler — the man who patented the perforated toilet paper roll — included a diagram in his patent showing the paper clearly hanging over the top.

This single drawing has been used for more than a century as “proof” that the over‑orientation is the One True Way, as if the U.S. Patent Office were the Vatican and this diagram were a papal decree.

And the reasons people give for their preference?

Over‑rollers claim:

• the paper is easier to reach if the dispenser is mounted on the wall directly across from the toilet

• it’s more hygienic because it reduces the risk of knuckles touching dirty bathroom surfaces

• it’s what “civilized people” do

• hotels do it this way, and hotels are never wrong

Under‑rollers claim:

• it makes it harder for cats and toddlers to unspool the entire roll

• it looks tidier

• because it takes slightly more effort to unroll, it discourages people from pulling unnecessarily long, wasteful lengths of paper

• their parents do it this way, and parents are never wrong

And, of course, many, many surveys have been conducted. Interestingly — and I say this only as a statement of fact, not to anoint one group as correct — they consistently reveal that about seven in ten of us believe the over‑roll position is the proper one.

Nothing motivates people to complain about someone quite like marrying them. So it’s not surprising that the way a roll of toilet paper is hung is one of the more common household complaints.

Seems to me this could’ve been a simple experiment to conduct before the whole “I do” thing, but what do I know.

If you are genuinely annoyed with your spouse because they didn’t twist a roll of toilet paper an additional 180°, then yes — I do think there’s a problem with your marriage… and it’s not likely what you think.

Because to my way of thinking, it’s far worse to be confronted by the empty cardboard tube you didn’t notice before taking your seat.

Isn’t that a fine how‑do‑you‑do.

This is one of those moments where even a dyed-in-the-wool atheist will begin to silently pray to whatever god will listen to him that a spare roll is tucked away somewhere in a bathroom cabinet. Meanwhile, you have to do that whole hunched‑over, pants‑around‑your‑ankles shuffle around the bathroom as you desperately search — maybe you find one, maybe you don’t.

That’s way worse.

So I say this with full confidence and without the tiniest iota of exaggeration: the way a toilet paper roll is hung doesn’t matter to me at all.

I’m just happy if there’s something on the roll.

I mean, there has to be more than the three or four squares typically left behind by some inconsiderate dork who reasoned that because he left at least one, it absolved him of the moral responsibility to load a new roll.

Because those people — the same ones who leave a carton in the fridge with less than a shot glass of milk in it — well, let’s just say there’s a special wing in Hell reserved just for them.

Rant over.

The Armistice

When you zoom out far enough, all these battles start to look the same.

One day, it’s the dishwasher. The next it'll be the thermostat, the ketchup, or the toilet paper.

The hill changes. The instinct doesn't.

None of them matter, and yet all of them do, because they’re the tiny rituals that make a household feel like your household.

You don’t choose them.

You inherit them.

And then you defend them with the zeal of someone who believes they've personally defined "room temperature.”

But maybe that’s fine.

Because half the time, whatever is the matter isn’t anything that actually matters.

Maybe the world is chaotic enough that we’re entitled to one or two irrational loyalties.

Just keep the fridge stocked, keep the thermostat reasonable, and for the love of all that is holy, replace the empty toilet paper roll.

Everything else is negotiable.

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