After my last post, I started thinking about the plus side of the current economy. For one thing, it's kind of fun to have everyone in the same boat.
I can only imagine that this is how it must have felt during World War II when everyone made sacrifices for the war effort. My friend even has her own 'victory garden' ... her personal victory over inflated grocery store produce prices.
Here are some other good things that have come out of the current crisis:
#1) Free Groceries - I have 3 great coupons in my purse right now. The first one was mailed directly to me from Ralphs grocery store. I earned $14 in free groceries by using my Ralphs Reward Card when I shopped. They also included valuable coupons for items I buy from there on a regular basis. The other two coupons came in the mail with the Wednesday circulars ... one is for a free $10 gift card if I buy $50 worth of groceries from Stater Bros. The other is for $5 of free groceries if I buy $30 worth at Fresh & Easy. These incentives are really appreciated. Also some groceries have gone up in price but I've noticed that others have dropped.
2) We have been forced to explore alternative forms of transportation. This is possibly the greatest thing that has come out of this crisis, more and more people sharing cars, using buses, buying scooters, etc. And believe me, I am someone who never would have considered using a bus to go somewhere, now everyone I know seems to be carrying around bus route pamphlets!
3) Recycling is something we do religiously now. Good for the environment plus we usually make enough to go out for lunch after turning in our cans and bottles.
4) As people are unable to sell their homes, more and more properties are coming up for rent and thus rent prices are dropping. We ended up with a two bedroom/one bath unit that rivals what I used to pay for rent $10 years ago!
5) I'm enjoying watching the governments efforts to get people back into all these houses that are sitting around empty. It will be interesting to see what incentives they come up with. I don't know if it will ever be worth my while to own a house again some day though. With house prices falling, all the old reasons for buying one have flown out the window! The only way it would make sense now is if it was an income producing investment, not for personal use.
6) How can I put this delicately, hmmmm ... the people who wait on me now at McDonalds actually speak English! Also, we live in a town that relies heavily on tourism and we appreciate our visiting snowbirds more than ever. This makes us more tolerant of their eccentricities.
7) Besides saving on housing and groceries, a lot of companies are trying to figure out ways to make things more affordable for people. We will all benefit from this, no matter what our economic status is.
8) There are more and more enjoyable reality TV shows about how people with large families manage to make ends meet. Besides being entertaining, a lot of the shows have helpful suggestions for trimming costs.
9) Better health - people are gardening, walking places, trying to make better choices when eating so that the food they have truly counts.
10) Camaraderie - I'm not the Big Loser trying to get by during a time of prosperity, everyone is feeling the pinch and trying to save money. Learning to get by on less is also good for everyone. My daughter and I are in a much smaller place than we've ever lived before and it's suiting us just fine. We enjoy being resourceful in creating storage space ... for example, using my 2 drawer file cabinet as a side table in our living room, using a hope chest as our coffee table, etc.
Showing posts with label Recycling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recycling. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Adventures in Recycling
In my quest for ways to make ends meet, I discovered that I was unwittingly discarding valuable items each and every day. My middle daughter E informed me that all of those soda cans and wine bottles that I was tossing into the garbage were worth a lot of money. This, as you can imagine, immediately grabbed my attention and I pleaded with her to tell me more.
It turns out that you can turn in empty cans, plastic bottles and glass bottles for cold, hard cash! Who knew? E says that she saves her empties religiously and, about once a month takes them to a recycling center and drives away with, like, $50 in cash! Wow, that's enough to get us through at least a weekend of groceries, or a tank of gas, or a manicure & pedicure, or ... well, the mind reels at the possibilities.
So I did it, I saved and saved until we had 3 black trash bags full. Today I decided that the time had come to claim my $50+. I had lunch dates scheduled for the next two days and no way to pay my share of the tab. And there was no incoming cash on the horizon.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I went out in back this a.m. to find the bags of recycling. I located them in a big old box but, when I lifted them out of the box, I discovered a swam of ants all over the inside! Ewwww. I hit the bags against the wall of the house a couple of times and unhappily put the antsy bags in my trunk.
Where does one go to recycle? I aimlessly drove around the neighborhood until I discovered a structure that could only be used for something as random as recycling. There appeared to be a dozen or so people out in front, the caliber of which I normally don't get the opportunity to associate with. They all seemed to be pushing shopping carts full of cans towards the structure.
After parking, I walked over to a hut and found a helpful young man inside who barked at me "you want those weighed?" I explained to him that I'd never done this before and therefore didn't know what I wanted. He shrugged and walked away and I was left with no recourse but to watch my new cohorts, all of whom seemed to know exactly what to do.
An elderly gentleman turned his bulging black trash bag upside down and emptied the contents into a large blue bin. I noticed that only cans came out of his bag. His glass bottles he had neatly standing up inside a box of some sort. Then I watched a rather well put together young woman (compared to the others in our crowd) go up to an opening in the wall and start shoving plastic bottles, cans, and glass bottles inside. I asked her what she was doing and why she wasn't having her cans weighed. She said that either way worked fine and if I decided to put mine into the opening in the wall, I should put them in bottom first.
Bottom first, I could do that. Plus it would save me from having to sort the cluster of items in my trash bags. As the young lady finished, she pushed a button and a receipt popped out at her. She smiled back over her shoulder at me and said that she was taking it into the nearby grocery store and redeem it for cash! She would only be getting a dollar seventy-five but that would be enough for a burrito, right? Righto!
As I opened my bags, I realized that I had an awful lot of cans ... perhaps I should use one of those blue bins and have them weighed? So I dug in and started sorting. What a nasty, disgusting business! I ended up with all sorts of fluids all over my hands and clothing. Mental note: encourage family to wash containers before discarding them. Some of the items were even stuck to the trash bags but, luckily, I didn't encounter any of the afore mentioned ants.
I sorted and tossed until I had a practically full blue bin, which I pushed up to the ever helpful young man inside the recycling structure. He ignored me as I patiently waited my turn but then he asked the elderly gentleman if my blue bin belonged to him!!!! Excuse me but I hadn't work that long and hard only to have them misappropriated at this stage of the game. So I reclaimed my bin, while giving the young man a withering glance, and kept it at my side while I tackled the hole in the wall. I started putting plastic and glass bottles in there, one by one, bottoms first (I am nothing if not a quick study.)
The machine obliging accepted most of my offerings although it did spit a couple of bottles back at me. The young man won me over by adding a couple of random plastic bottles to my pile. Once I finished and had tossed a couple of larger items I'd brought (pronounced to be "trash" by people behind me in line) into the trash can. Apparently you can not recycle Tide or dog food containers.
I tentatively pushed the green button and the machine spewed out a receipt for $2.63! Then I pushed my blue bin of cans over to the young man who poured it into another blue bin and removed a couple of offending items. He weighed my cans, and produced a receipt for exactly $5.
As I stumbled trippingly over to the store to claim my bounty, I realized that it was far short of the promised $50+. But it was enough to buy 2 lottery tickets (funny how important lottery tickets become the poorer one gets) and some antibacterial hand gel, which was badly needed at that point. Needless to say, I cancelled both of my luncheon dates.
So that was my first experience in the Adventures of Recycling. And what do I have to show for it? A big bottle of antiseptic hand gel and ants in my car. Was it worth it? I'll get back to you about that!
It turns out that you can turn in empty cans, plastic bottles and glass bottles for cold, hard cash! Who knew? E says that she saves her empties religiously and, about once a month takes them to a recycling center and drives away with, like, $50 in cash! Wow, that's enough to get us through at least a weekend of groceries, or a tank of gas, or a manicure & pedicure, or ... well, the mind reels at the possibilities.
So I did it, I saved and saved until we had 3 black trash bags full. Today I decided that the time had come to claim my $50+. I had lunch dates scheduled for the next two days and no way to pay my share of the tab. And there was no incoming cash on the horizon.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I went out in back this a.m. to find the bags of recycling. I located them in a big old box but, when I lifted them out of the box, I discovered a swam of ants all over the inside! Ewwww. I hit the bags against the wall of the house a couple of times and unhappily put the antsy bags in my trunk.
Where does one go to recycle? I aimlessly drove around the neighborhood until I discovered a structure that could only be used for something as random as recycling. There appeared to be a dozen or so people out in front, the caliber of which I normally don't get the opportunity to associate with. They all seemed to be pushing shopping carts full of cans towards the structure.
After parking, I walked over to a hut and found a helpful young man inside who barked at me "you want those weighed?" I explained to him that I'd never done this before and therefore didn't know what I wanted. He shrugged and walked away and I was left with no recourse but to watch my new cohorts, all of whom seemed to know exactly what to do.
An elderly gentleman turned his bulging black trash bag upside down and emptied the contents into a large blue bin. I noticed that only cans came out of his bag. His glass bottles he had neatly standing up inside a box of some sort. Then I watched a rather well put together young woman (compared to the others in our crowd) go up to an opening in the wall and start shoving plastic bottles, cans, and glass bottles inside. I asked her what she was doing and why she wasn't having her cans weighed. She said that either way worked fine and if I decided to put mine into the opening in the wall, I should put them in bottom first.
Bottom first, I could do that. Plus it would save me from having to sort the cluster of items in my trash bags. As the young lady finished, she pushed a button and a receipt popped out at her. She smiled back over her shoulder at me and said that she was taking it into the nearby grocery store and redeem it for cash! She would only be getting a dollar seventy-five but that would be enough for a burrito, right? Righto!
As I opened my bags, I realized that I had an awful lot of cans ... perhaps I should use one of those blue bins and have them weighed? So I dug in and started sorting. What a nasty, disgusting business! I ended up with all sorts of fluids all over my hands and clothing. Mental note: encourage family to wash containers before discarding them. Some of the items were even stuck to the trash bags but, luckily, I didn't encounter any of the afore mentioned ants.
I sorted and tossed until I had a practically full blue bin, which I pushed up to the ever helpful young man inside the recycling structure. He ignored me as I patiently waited my turn but then he asked the elderly gentleman if my blue bin belonged to him!!!! Excuse me but I hadn't work that long and hard only to have them misappropriated at this stage of the game. So I reclaimed my bin, while giving the young man a withering glance, and kept it at my side while I tackled the hole in the wall. I started putting plastic and glass bottles in there, one by one, bottoms first (I am nothing if not a quick study.)
The machine obliging accepted most of my offerings although it did spit a couple of bottles back at me. The young man won me over by adding a couple of random plastic bottles to my pile. Once I finished and had tossed a couple of larger items I'd brought (pronounced to be "trash" by people behind me in line) into the trash can. Apparently you can not recycle Tide or dog food containers.
I tentatively pushed the green button and the machine spewed out a receipt for $2.63! Then I pushed my blue bin of cans over to the young man who poured it into another blue bin and removed a couple of offending items. He weighed my cans, and produced a receipt for exactly $5.
As I stumbled trippingly over to the store to claim my bounty, I realized that it was far short of the promised $50+. But it was enough to buy 2 lottery tickets (funny how important lottery tickets become the poorer one gets) and some antibacterial hand gel, which was badly needed at that point. Needless to say, I cancelled both of my luncheon dates.
So that was my first experience in the Adventures of Recycling. And what do I have to show for it? A big bottle of antiseptic hand gel and ants in my car. Was it worth it? I'll get back to you about that!
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