Cans, deposited

I forgot to mention, my roommate and I finally accumulated three bags of cans and went down to the bottle deposit place to get our due. Unlike in New York, apparently, regular stores don't accept deposit cans, so you have to go to some dank, smelly warehouse in east Cambridge to claim your reward. And, as I predicted, this warehouse was full of homeless people plying their trade. Also, you have to sort and arrange your own cans. After all that, we got fully $3.20 for our efforts. This is barely enough to buy a latte.

I concluded from this adventure that in order to get the most out of this deposit law, one really needs to have either 10 beer parties a month or 10 soda-guzzling children. But I still intend to go back in June and get another $3 worth of thrift.

Report on DIY dry-cleaning

In the comments of a previous post, I lamented the hidden costs of wool and cashmere sweaters buried in the maintenance problem. You can buy 'em for cheap, but then you have to dry-clean when they're dirty, which, within a couple of years, means about a 500% mark-up on the retail price. In response, one of the commenters helpfully directed my attention to DIY dry-cleaning.

This is not dry-cleaning per se, since it is largely based on soaking the sweaters in water and seems like it wouldn't do much for stains, but my sweaters weren't stained so much as just sweaty, so I figured this method was worth a shot. So I bought a mini bottle of baby shampoo, squeezed some into a huge salad bowl (my sink is too gross for any cleaning to conceivably take place in it), filled it with water, and let my sweaters stew in it like marinating steaks for an hour. Then I toweled them per these instructions, and although drying had to take place on a different towel and took somewhat longer than might be hoped given that my apartment is not only dirty but also freezing, the results look good. The sweaters retained their shape just fine, and no longer smell overworn. Total cost: $2.19, for the baby shampoo. Cheapness success!

My roommate did think this was weird though, so maybe this is one of those thrift achievements not worth bragging about socially.

You know you're cheap when...

... you're at the store and you see that the canned tomatoes you usually buy are on sale, a dollar off the usual price, and - after deciding that you'll also need to call your boyfriend and alert him to this excitement so that he too can bring home many, many cans - proceed to bring to the register more cans than you know full well you could carry home (and you will be carrying them home, because you're too cheap to use that Metrocard)... only to get rung up and see that this sale was not entered into the system... only to stand your ground, while the cashier first attempts a price check and then just goes herself to check the price, only to tell you that it wasn't these cans that were on sale, but some other product. Boo.