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If you’ve been here awhile, you know I am very frugal. You also know that I have a very difficult time throwing away things in the garbage that I don’t believe are actual garbage. Even when they are.
We recycle everything in our house that can be recycled. We’ve also upgraded some things so that we don’t have to recycle others. Like water bottles. We installed an under the sink water filter and dispenser about a year and half ago and we love it. It has saved us over $500 each year in disposable water bottles and will until it dies and needs to be replaced.
I hate throwing money away and will find a way to circumvent it when I can. So to throw actual money away is abhorrent to my mind.
When I was cleaning our laundry room a couple of weeks ago, I found a bunch of change in a tray that I had stashed on a shelf. Quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. I think it added up to about two dollars and some change. But it was all that weird green color that change money turns when it gets wet, and rough and scaly. You know what I mean? I wasn’t about to throw it away, it was money. So I brought it upstairs and scrubbed it all with my kitchen scrubby. Almost all of it came clean, except for a couple of the pennies. So I ran some warm water into a bowl with dish soap and set it aside to soak. I have no idea why I thought that this would work. I mean the entire reason they were in the condition they were in in the first place was because they had been wet. 😕
A few hours went by and I started to load the dishwasher. You know where this is going, right? I’m scraping everything into the sink for the garbage disposal, rinsing and loading everything up and I completely forgot about those pennies. Until I turned the garbage disposal on. If you have a garbage disposal you know how fast your reflexes are. It took me approximately 0.0000000001 second to turn it back off. But that was enough time for the stupid thing to try to eat the penny.
Yes, I know that the disposal is not at fault here. It was my ridiculousness that caused this catastrophe. It was a penny for crying out loud. But I just couldn’t put it in the garbage. However, I also should not have put it somewhere that it was a given that I would do something like this. Know thyself. I do. I seriously do. I could have predicted this and I still did it. Sigh.
Do you know how much a garbage disposal costs? One exactly like ours was over $300.00. Yeah. Fun times. After discovering that little bit of information, I increased my efforts in vain trying to get that blasted penny out. The last time I managed to feed something to my disposal (I’m giving myself a headache rolling my eyes) I discovered that you can use the key that comes with it to turn it from underneath to UNJAM things. See! They built these things with people like me in mind. Well, that didn’t work this time. It was jammed in there to stay.
When Denton came home from work I showed him my dilemma and he poked around in there for about 8 seconds and out came the penny. Can you believe that?
I told him that it was because I loosened it for him. Look at the grind mark on that thing. And soaking them did not save them from the crud that is eating into them. Imagine that.
All of that to say: Note to self, Tracie: do not do something this idiotic again. No worries, next time it will be a completely new to me idiotic thing…..
