I need to come clean. I try so hard to be a better steward of the Earth. I recycle everything I can. I even dig through the garbage to see if others (Mr. Big Ed, I mean you) is holding up his end. I try to compost every possible thing. I make my own cleaners, laundry soap, dog food, spray starch, bar soap, shopping bags, and grow my own loofahs.
Saturday morning we were planning a nice breakfast of sausage gravy and biscuits and I looked in the pantry and my box of Pioneer Biscuit Mix (local product from right here) didn't have enough in it to make biscuits. Jonathon looked at me and said "Well, can't we just make them from scratch?" You know that emoticon on instant messaging that has big wide eyes and looks like DUH, you dumb twit? Well, that is exactly how I felt!! How is it that it never occurred to me to just make biscuits my own self? So I did, it took no time, I had all the ingredients right there AND they were way better than the ones from the mix.
This got me to thinking about all the other things in my day that I don't stop to look at from all angles and see another way to do them. Or maybe to make it myself instead of just falling in the "go to the store routine". I am sure that there are loads of things I could be doing better, more efficiently, or just more frugally. So here is list of a few things off the top of my head I came up with to improve on:
1. Make my weekly menus using more of what is on hand so things don't get old sitting around the pantry or the fridge.
2. Find a way to hang my clothes out rather than put every single item in the dryer.
3. Use all the lotions, shower gels, liquid soaps that are under every sink in the house before I buy one more item.
4. Organize something every day. One drawer, one shelf, one room, something.
5. Another Compactor does this and I love this idea. Get rid of 10 items a day. I bet I can get rid of 10 items a day for 30 days just in my office!
6. Decide whether I am really ever going to be a coupon user or not. It gets really depressing taking all the time to clip and organize them and then forget them until they are expired. Either get with the program or just let it go.
7. Use my library card more than my charge card. This means to go to the library rather than my favorite used book store.
Ok, that's it for now. Anyone else have any thing they need to fess up to? Anything you want to try to do better?
sometimes i leave my computer on all night because i dont want to have to wait a half hour to start working in the morning...
ReplyDeleteand i drive a car, when it starts.
and sometimes i put chocolate syrup farmed by child slave labor in west africa in my fair trade organic coffee...
Chris knows that I get very irritated if there is food in our fridge that goes bad. It is not a good day to be around when that happens :(
ReplyDeleteAnd I admit to digging through the trash to pull out recylable material put in there by your brothers (although the one of them who sees me do this is getting much better about not putting stuff in there in the first place).
My new year's resolutions are somewhat like your daily organizing ideas...just on a monthly/grander scale. So far, it's only February, and I'm behind :(
I am a good customer of Half Price Books, and tend to cycle books through my mom (she buys them, I borrow them ;) but library card use would be a good idea.
LOL at your *DUH* moment on biscuits. I told Chris that my goal next year is to have no packaged food in our house (no need for chemical/processing when he's so creative from scratch!). I doubt we'll fully get there, but we're working towards it.