Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without

Anthony and I have really worked hard to learn how to decrease waste in our home not just for the environment but for our household economy. Today was our monthly visit to the recyling center. It is amazing to me that our trash becomes cash. Anthony and I use our recyling money to go on dates and you would be surprised how much it brings in. Also, we do everything we can to give things to goodwill when we get new items. For example, when we moved into our apartment we were given quite a few items from people who wanted to help us start out. We got 2 sets of dishes, silverware, appliances, etc... Every time we buy something that we really want or get a gift of a new item, we take our gently used items to goodwill, salvation army, or a number of other thrift places and give it as a donation. People are always looking for good deals at these places and I like to think that I am helping them find one.

I thought I would also post a few more suggestions for how to recycle more and save what is still valuable:

-- Buy Recycled paper and print on both sides of your paper.
-- Take your old magazines to the doctor's office, gym, or somewhere else so that others can take advantage of what you are done with (Cut off your name and address)
-- Buy a reusable coffee container at Starbucks so that they can use less paper and plastic for your drink.
-- Instead of buying bottled water, get a water cooler and use a reusable container to fill up.
-- Keep four recycling bins at your house to separate paper, plastic, metal, and glass and keep recycling going. It brings in a little extra cash and keeps it from the landfill

There are a few tips that we use at our house. I hope you can use some of them at your house. Here are the last couple of days info...I have been a little under the weather.

January 6, 2009 Thankfulness:

We are thankful for our blog because it's a place where we can keep everyone up on our life and also keep up on their blogs. We are thankful that the internet makes it easy to live far away from people you love.

January 7, 2009 Thankfulness:

We are thankful for a giftcard we got for Christmas to go out to dinner. It's so thoughtful when people give us gifts for dates because it's hard to make ends meet sometimes and it helps to have a fallback when we want a night out.

January 8, 2009 Thankfulness:

We are thankful for the ability to recycle and help our world while making a little extra cash for dates. We are thankful that California takes that seriously and has a lot of locations to be able to recycle.

January 6-8 Learning/Growth:

We have learned that it's important to watch our tone with each other. It's so easy when you live with someone every day to start to treat them too casually and not watching how you talk to your loved one. This is something that I have had to check myself on long ago and moreso I am noticing it recently how easy it is to relax too much and start to get lazy on how we treat each other.

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