STOP no one move.
Hands where I can see them.
Carefully open your desk drawers.
Look.
How many of you routinely save paper- and binder clips that land on your desk?
Be honest now…
(Honest answers get Tuna-Flavoured-Jell-O)
I was going to suggest a nice rice pudding. 
(I just had some four-day-old rice for supper - it was just fine when I re-heated it.)
Well, yeah - what else am I going to do with them - just throw them out?
Heh heh heh - Hal’s mom re-uses catfood containers. 
We won’t get fooled again!
Is that because he is more reused on the inside than the outside?
eewwww
We have a friend that was environmentally correct before it was the cool thing to do. One night he dropped by right at dinner time and ate with us. We were having fried chicken. He ate the bones.:rolleyes: There was still plenty of chicken left. I could not believe it. When he started to leave he asked if he could take our trash with him as he saw me put a beer bottle in there.
My grandparents were frugal products of the Depression who never threw out a thing. You know, rinsing out paper towels to reuse, washing out potato chip bags because the foot-thick stack on top of the fridge might not be enough, dried out and rattling cans of pork & beans because “it’s a sin to waste food,” paper coffee filters, every margarine tub that entered the house since 1974…
Worth noting also is that my grandmother didn’t believe in washing dishes with soap because soap’ll give you the trots, you know :barf smilie:
:eek:
I’d be petrified of a bone sliver perforating my stomach, if I didn’t break every tooth and get a chunk lodged in my throat and choke to death first.
I love this story. Hal, how old is Mom, if you don’t mind my asking? I’m wondering what could possible have made her reuse to the point of…kitty food containers.
What, did he crack open the bones and eat the marrow? That’s crazy, chicken marrow isn’t very good.
I know I’ve mentioned this before but when my family was cleaning out my grandparents house after they were dead, we found a bag full of chicken feathers. Because you never know when you might need a bunch of chicken feathers, apparently.
I do, but at work we use a lot of them. They paperclip the money in the register and put it in the drop safe, then I unpaperclip that money when I count it. Every few days a cashier comes to me with an empty paperclip holder that I refill. This is all on top of normal paperclip needs. So I do hang on to them…also, when we run out it’s usually ME running to Office Max to get more.
I’ll do you one better, if I run across a little paperclip (we just use big ones) or one that’s bent a bit too wide to be used again, I put it on the side. Those are the ones I’ll use on things I know I won’t get back. Like a stack of checks going to the bank.
I know I’ll lose at least one paperclip a day to the bank, might as well be one I’d probably throwout anyways.
But it’s not to be cheap, it’s to put off a trip to the office store for paper clips.
I read a novel about the Vietnam War (maybe The Short Timers or The 13th Valley) and one of the characters mentioned the same sort of thing. That not rinsing the detergent off utensils completely would leave a residue that could cause diarrhoea (a favourite trick to play on unpopular officers). Maybe there is some basis to the idea that is no longer an issue?
I’m not saying there isn’t useful stuff to do with old rice, I’m saying I had a perfectly lovely shepherd’s pie, green beans and dinner rolls already prepped for dinner and we did not need to figure out how to use up 38 cents worth of rice because, “it would be a shame to throw it out.” We live in the land of plenty and holding onto stuff (especially easily biodegradable stuff) out of fear of waste is ridiculous. Unless she wants to pack it up and send it to those starving African kids my mom was always talking about it needs to be thrown out before it starts rotting in my fridge, TYVM.
Saving cheap, useless stuff is the way to end up a hoarder and I have issues enough with neatness that I’m not willing to even start going down that road. In the trash with all of that junk, I say!
Well, I know somebody who on occasion has to hand wash dishes. They use soap and water. They use almost no water to rinse off the soapy water to “save water” (and no towel drying either). So, what ends up on the stuff is dried soap. To be honest I’d rather them NOT use soap if that is what they are going to do.
I dig your funky jive; I don’t like waste just for waste’s sake, but I do feel a lot better about throwing stuff away if I can recycle it or compost it.
My grandparents did this too, and I lived with them for a couple of years. I picked up some of their habits. My grandfather used to do things like save and rinse bleach bottles and cut off the bottoms, at a slant, to use the remaining bottle with handle as a scoop. And his reasoning was that he’d already paid for the bottle, why shouldn’t he use it again? I do the same sort of thing, sometimes. However, I only re-use things if I think that it’s safe.
However, while I think it’s a sin to waste food, I think it’s an even bigger sin to make yourself sick on old food. So I try to rotate the food in the house, and be aware of what I’ve got that needs to be used. In fact, I made pot roast chicken on Saturday, and chicken stock yesterday, and tonight I’m going to pack up the broth with the leftover meat in single serving containers and freeze it. This way, I’ll have some nice homemade chicken soup when I’m too damn tired or too sick to cook it myself, and that’s exactly when I need it. It’s just stock and bits of chicken, I can throw in some veggies or rice or noodles if I want it when I heat it up. Or I can just enjoy the basic chicken soup.
Bleach bottles with the bottoms cut out make great bailing buckets for a raft or rowboat, incidentally.
My dad’s like that with food – only he’ll buy stuff because it’s on sale, and it never gets eaten, and my mother and I have to pitch it when he’s not around. I’ll be like, “Dad, that tomato’s getting soft.” “No, it’s still good! Leave it go!” My grandfather was like that. So I just wait until he’s not there, and into the trash it goes!
My family reuses plastic margarine and butter tubs, etc, but we don’t keep them forever. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Tupperware. After awhile, they wear out, and we recycle them, and then use new ones. No big deal. I never thought of that as especially frugal.
Or we’ll just use plastic gags from the store as trash bags.
My Mamaw, who grew up dirt poor in the mountains, wasn’t just a saver/reuser, she had some kind of chronic kleptomania when it came to plastic silverware, salt/pepper packets and napkins from take out resteraunts. I cannot remember there ever being a time when we didn’t go up to her house and there wasn’t at least two drawers full of stolen silverware, etc.
Left over rice, if too old for fried rice or rice pudding, gets fed to our chickens. They then recycle it into eggs!
I deal with wasted food by making less of it. I cook enough for the three of us, and that’s it. No leftovers means less food to rot in the fridge.