Saturday, November 15, 2008

You win some, you lose some

Yesterday was a day where we made a positive step forward in our quest for eating better and a step backward in not wasting resources.

Our step backward occurred due to a broken printer. It never fails that the printer will break right after you change the ink cartridge. A major paper jam broke one of the rollers inside the printer, part of it actually snapped, and the carriage mechanism that moves the ink cartridges along could no longer move. The printer was only 1 year old. These things are just not made to last which doesn't do much for my desire to not waste resources. Since we scan lots of stuff for both my store and Paul's work we decided to just purchase a scanner and a separate printer instead of getting an all-in-one. Problem is, no where we visited yesterday sold them separately. We ended up with another all-in-one, one that uses different cartridges then the old one. I was really excited to see that HP offers recycling of the old printer until I saw that I not only have to ship it to them but I also have to pay them to recycle it, so it's going to the dump. I tried to shop locally for my new printer but after calling around I found that no place in our valley sells them. I know there are many people up here that don't even own a computer but I'm still surprised none of the stores carry even one kind of printer.

The positive step forward in eating occurred because I signed us up to receive a produce shipment from small farmers. It's a service that is newly available here in our valley and it's cheap! For $33.80 we will get enough fresh produce to feed the four of us for at least a week, it's all certified organic (not that this is a major deal for me), and it's "local" (as local as we are going to get at 50-200 miles from here). The boxes average 30 pounds a week so I'm going to have to change the way we eat in order to use it all before it goes bad. More of our money will be going to small farmers and less to Sam's Club, that alone makes me excited. Since that amount of money is about half of our food budget for the week there will be lots of changes made around here in what I cook. I'm excited to see what our first shipment looks like next Saturday.

3 comments:

Morgan the Muse said...

Well, printers are kind of odd. We got on from a friend who is the garbage man in town. We've had it for a while, and it works and all. But it is kind of expensive at times, especially when it got to the point where it was cheaper to buy a new printer everytime, than to buy ink. That is so wrong! But congrats on the food thing, that is seriously cool.

Marie N. said...

The new produce service sounds great! I regret that the farmer's market near me operates on Sunday mornings when I'm at church :-(

Jane said...

Getting a box of produce like that from our CSA has been really good for us. We eat more veggies and more variety.