Busy!
Happy Christmas score this morning -- My mother revealed recently that her el cheapo vacuum cleaner stopped working awhile back. For who knows how long, she has apparently just been spot-vacuuming with her Dust Buster. My first reaction was to rearrange Christmas shopping plans to get her a new vacuum, which made me debate whether to replace the Walmart el cheapo special she'd buy for herself, or buy her a fancier one. This debate went on over a few days. Then it dawned on me -- I see people giving away working vacuum cleaners on Freecycle all the time! Why spend precious Christmas funds even on an el cheapo model when there ain't nuthin' más el cheapo than free. Tack on a few bucks for a professional cleaning, and we're good to go. Within 24 hours, I had a hit on my want ad from a nice lady who had simultaneously made a posting for her working vacuum since she just got a fancier replacement. I picked it up today, and immediately drove it to a local vacuum cleaner repair store with coupon from their website in hand. (Incidentally, it was heartwarming to see a local business like this absolutely booming with business!) For $35 they'll take it apart completely, clean everything, fix it up good as new. My mother gets a working, nice clean vacuum for $35, and the environment doesn't get another dose of nastiness for all the energy and plastic and other materials to manufacture a new machine. Yay!
There is one thing that I've found really enriching about the period of enforced frugality that has come with our life in Texas and its various volumes of the two of us living on one income. That's paying better attention to what we can fix, repurpose, revive, recycle, or Freecycle rather than just replace. We used to spend more money to create more trash and waste more resources the old way, all so wastefully. This way we're doing better by our pocketbooks and the environment, and frankly it's just fun! It forces some creativity, planning, and forethought that I really enjoy.
Otherwise spent my morning buzzing around in a frenzy of unusual chores -- walking around the house replacing burned out lightbulbs, taking the piggy bank on its annual trip to visit the Coinstar machine before Christmas, a run to the Post Office to send off a small gift, cleaning the oven for the first time in my life... and I don't mean just this oven. I mean any oven. Ya know, it's not quite as easy as the TV commercials make it look! Of course I may have been timid with how much goop I sprayed on the oven, and perhaps it's better to follow the Overnight directions rather than the 2-Hour ones. Oh well. It's cleaner than it was previously.
In other stunning news of environmentally-friendly Freecycling and surely extraordinary organization, I secured the gift of a 3-ring binder for my knitting patterns, and some file folders for our home office in another score a few days ago. Yesterday afternoon, I went through our single drawer of files color-coded Yours, Mine, and Ours. I had fun recategorizing a few of Yours and Mine as Ours now that we've done things like title both cars in both our names, and so forth. Now that I've established our system, the maintenance is not arduous. The files themselves only need update once or maybe twice a year. Old files went into longer-term storage in a file box in the closet, a few new ones joined the mix, labels changed on some to reflect changes in vendor or ownership as mentioned above. That project isn't quite finished, but it's mostly done. I hope to wrap it up before we leave for the holiday.
Trace
There is one thing that I've found really enriching about the period of enforced frugality that has come with our life in Texas and its various volumes of the two of us living on one income. That's paying better attention to what we can fix, repurpose, revive, recycle, or Freecycle rather than just replace. We used to spend more money to create more trash and waste more resources the old way, all so wastefully. This way we're doing better by our pocketbooks and the environment, and frankly it's just fun! It forces some creativity, planning, and forethought that I really enjoy.
Otherwise spent my morning buzzing around in a frenzy of unusual chores -- walking around the house replacing burned out lightbulbs, taking the piggy bank on its annual trip to visit the Coinstar machine before Christmas, a run to the Post Office to send off a small gift, cleaning the oven for the first time in my life... and I don't mean just this oven. I mean any oven. Ya know, it's not quite as easy as the TV commercials make it look! Of course I may have been timid with how much goop I sprayed on the oven, and perhaps it's better to follow the Overnight directions rather than the 2-Hour ones. Oh well. It's cleaner than it was previously.
In other stunning news of environmentally-friendly Freecycling and surely extraordinary organization, I secured the gift of a 3-ring binder for my knitting patterns, and some file folders for our home office in another score a few days ago. Yesterday afternoon, I went through our single drawer of files color-coded Yours, Mine, and Ours. I had fun recategorizing a few of Yours and Mine as Ours now that we've done things like title both cars in both our names, and so forth. Now that I've established our system, the maintenance is not arduous. The files themselves only need update once or maybe twice a year. Old files went into longer-term storage in a file box in the closet, a few new ones joined the mix, labels changed on some to reflect changes in vendor or ownership as mentioned above. That project isn't quite finished, but it's mostly done. I hope to wrap it up before we leave for the holiday.
Trace