$$: Dec 9 — Recycling on the Cheap

The Home Depot — $47.94
Our “waste man­age­ment” com­pany recently announced that they were greatly expand­ing the list of recy­clable mate­ri­als they’d col­lect. This, com­bined with the fact that they went “sin­gle stream” a while ago and the fact that they pick up recy­clables only every other week means that our old recy­cling tub just isn’t suf­fi­cient any more.

I decided a few weeks ago to pick up a new trash can that would be used only for recy­clable materials.

So, this morn­ing after drop­ping The Son off at class, I stopped by The Home Depot. And there, in the trash can aisle was my dream-come-true and my worst night­mare all wrapped up into a distinctive-blue wheeled, flip-top trash can with a white recy­cle sym­bol on the front. It was per­fec­tion! It was beau­ti­ful! I wanted one! It was $65.00! For a trash can. With tax it would have been around 70 bucks for one trash can.

I don’t know if I was more shocked at the price or at how much I longed to own one.

There was no way in h-e-double-hockey-sticks I was going to spend $65 on a trash can. None. None whatsoever.

So I took my time and eval­u­ated every sin­gle trash can option. I ended up buy­ing a 32 gal­lon grey rubber-like (as opposed to the more rigid plas­tic of our other trash cans) round trash can with a snap-on lid. The price: $15.79.

When I got home I took out the roll of duct tape and applied two sil­ver tri­an­gles to the sides of the trash can and a small sil­ver tri­an­gle on the lid. I’m pretty sure my “waste man­age­ment engi­neers” will fig­ure out that this par­tic­u­lar can con­tains my recyclables.

The Hus­band was quite pleased with my handy­work and com­pli­mented me on my $50 duct-tape recy­cling symbols.

I also stocked up on long-neck flood light bulbs for the two rails of track light­ing used in our base­ment family/computer room.

Car Wash — $12.25
I took the oppor­tu­nity to give The Husband’s Impreza a thor­ough wash and vac­u­um­ing at the local DIY car wash.

Kroger — $19.35
The Son and I ven­tured out into the cold evening because we’d been told that his make-up art class was being held tonight. That infor­ma­tion was incor­rect (good thing I didn’t just drop and run like I usu­ally do). We took the oppor­tu­nity to stop at the gro­cery store for a few essen­tials

• two car­tons of Hori­zon choco­late milk
• two Hun­gry Man frozen dinners
• two pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (one for The Daugh­ter; one for The Son)

We got a kick out of our Noah’s Ark shop­ping trip — two of everything.

Burger Joint — $4.94
The Daugh­ter appar­ently had lunch or din­ner at the local burger joint today. I think we need to sit down and have a dis­cus­sion about the specifics regard­ing which meals we’ll pay for and what she needs to pay for. Up until recently, this has not been an issue but now that The Daugh­ter is dri­ving her­self more often and engag­ing in even more extracur­ric­u­lar sports activ­i­ties, her din­ing out expenses have increased and we need to estab­lish some clear guide­lines as to who pays for what.

Related posts:

1. Food!
2. Wool Wash: Pur­chase and Prod­uct Reviews
3. Day 186: Fast Food
4. Day 139: Great Under­wear Search of ’08 (update 2)
5. Day 106: Car stuff, Church stuff, Christ­mas stuff and a big Stu­pid Tax