Stuphy Stuph
For lack of a better title…LOL!
I don’t remember if I mentioned that someone stole our recycling bin a few weeks ago. The only way to get a new one is to go to the Department of Public Works to get it, during regular business hours. The problem? The DPW is NOT on a bus route, and since I don’t have access to a car during these normal business hours, I can’t well go and get one. So we had cardboard and glass and crap piling up for a few weeks. We could have put it in the trash, but our crap town charges per bag for trash collection, and it would have cost us a small fortune to just throw it away.
Mike finally hauled his ass up early enough, and went to the DPW to get a new bin, before work one day. Right now, it’s in the apartment, full to the brim with everything that’s been piling up. It’s not going out until the very last minute on Tuesday. When the recycling truck comes by, I’ll be outside, waiting to bring the bin in after it’s emptied.
Mike is going to stop by Home Depot to buy some oil-based white paint, and a small paintbrush, one that I can paint letters and numbers with. Oil-based paint sticks better to plastic than water-based, and it has to be white because it will show up better against the blue color of the bin. He was just planning to put our address on it, but I said we need to go one better – “I stole this recycling bin from (insert address here)”. On ALL sides of the bin, so if anyone steals this one, they can’t hide the message by just turning it so it doesn’t face the street.
Hopefully, that might deter anyone from stealing it in the first place. And if someone DOES take it, perhaps some honest person might happen by the thief’s house, see it sitting there outside, and take it and return it to the proper address. Maybe. We can always hope.
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We went Thanksgiving shopping on Sunday. I think one of the things I like best about Toikey Day is that it is not as horrifically commercialized as Christmas. Most of the advertising consists of supermarket flyers, and their price wars over the cost of turkey. They’re actually pretty cheap around here this year. We got ours at Shaw’s, a frozen one from Shady Brook Farms, for 47¢ a pound.
Okay, so Johnnie’s Foodmaster has the same turkeys for 35¢ a pound. But not only do you have to find a coupon and remember to clip and bring it, you have to make an additional $10 purchase. I think we get a Johnnie’s Foodmaster flyer, which probably contains said coupon, in our weekly Big Pile O’ Junk Mail.
But I don’t LIKE Foodmaster! Sure, they have great “loss leader” prices, and sure, I could find ten bucks worth of other stuph to buy. But their non-sale items are usually a lot more expensive than non-sale items at other stores. I suppose you could just buy the turkey and $10 worth of other sale items (that is, if they don’t require an additional $10 purchase for EACH sale item, they used to do that, not sure if they still do or not), and then get everything else you need from another store. But seriously, it just seems like a lot more trouble than it’s worth.
I mean, let’s do the math. We bought a 12 pound turkey, at 47¢ a pound, total cost $5.64. Same turkey at Foodmaster would cost $4.20, giving me a whopping $1.44 saving. If we bought everything we needed to buy at Foodmaster, it would have cost us a LOT more than the $1.44 we would have saved.
Our car gets really good gas mileage, so it wouldn’t have cost more than $1.44 in gas to drive to another store. But why bother? Grocery shopping is enough of a pain…you gotta find a parking space, walk around getting your stuff, put up with idiots in the store, get in line to pay, and hope that the cashier isn’t dumber than a box of rocks and takes forever to figure out the identity of a butternut squash. Going to a second grocery store means you gotta do this crap all over again. Worth saving $1.44? I think NOT!
It amazes me as to how many people don’t take this into consideration. They see a dirt-cheap turkey advertised, it gets them into the store, and they end up spending MORE than they would have spent elsewhere on Thanksgiving dinner, and anything else they might need.
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Anyhoo, one annoying thing about shopping this time of year is that we’re being bombarded with Christmas stuph already, in fact, many stores have had it there since before Halloween. Heck, even now, most people probably haven’t sent out their Christmas invitations yet! Sheesh! I’d really rather NOT see Christmas stuph until after Thanksgiving is over. A lot of other people say that, too, but obviously SOMEONE is buying this crap now, otherwise, it would not be put out so soon.
Sometimes I wish I were a bear, and could just hibernate for the winter. Wake me up in April, when baseball season starts.
1Nicole
wrote on 24 November 2009 at 2:55
The older I get, the more I hate holidaze. Thanksgiving used to be fun and god knows I LOVE all the food, but now it’s just a huge family argument about who will eat where and who will be upset about who eats where. It’s all just a stressful pain in the ass. The one good thing about being married to my ex was that he had no family that he got along with, so every holiday was spent with my family. I’m not a huge fan of my family, but at least there was no squabbling about who was going where. This year we are going to David’s parent’s house and we have to LIE to my mother about it just to keep semi-peace. It’s so stupid. And, of course, we are already getting the third degree about Xmess. Gah. I just want to crawl in a hole and hide until January.