Battling Consumer Man
May 16th, 2008. Filed under: Finance & Fitness Fridays.I’ve been trying to become more environmentally friendly, but my husband just hasn’t been interested. That certainly makes it an uphill climb. Sometimes that hill looks like Mt. Everest. It’s a slow climb, but I refuse to sit down and give up. I’ve been replacing our light bulbs with CFL’s. I exchanged bulbs in a couple lamps and then I waited a month for him to put in the second two bulbs. This short person has trouble dealing with stuff on the ceiling, even with a ladder. What to do? The neighborhood handyman put those in along with the next pair I purchased. Any time I have to have handyman type stuff done, I always have a list of smaller things like those bulbs, replacing blinds, etc. Consumer Man is also Mr. Fumble Fingers with even minor things. All you ladies out there who are married to Mr. Handy Dandy or who do not have physical limitations and can do all this on your own, consider yourselves to be very fortunate.
One thing I can do is sew. That makes it handy when it comes to reusable bags, cloth napkins and the like. Consumer Man still drags home the plastic bags from shopping and will ignore the napkin by his plate and get up and bring back a paper towel. He doesn’t know that once my backlog of paper towels is gone, there will only be cloth napkins and rags for clean up. Garage sales and thrift shops to be good places to find linen items inexpensively. Another good place is estate sales. I’m also working at decreasing the amount of any kind of plastic that comes into my home and recycling as much as possible. If you read Fake Plastic Wannabe, you already know I’ve become more aware of the danger of plastic and really want to control it, rather than have it control my life. Consumer Man is coming around a little in this area. He no longer takes his beverage cans (which I’ve rinsed out and have ready to take out to my bins in the shed) and tosses them into the kitchen trash. He even sets his used cans by the kitchen sink now. About a month ago a small booklet about recycling in our county arrived in the Sunday newspaper and I’ve been able to locate multiple drop off sites using that. Yes, that Sunday paper has been dropped off. I don’t subscribe to any papers except the Sunday edition for the coupons. I do save much more than the cost of the paper by using these coupons. My area has no place that doubles coupons, but they all allow stacking.
As I’ve been using up cleaning supplies, I’ve turned to white vinegar and baking soda. It’s amazing what you can do with these inexpensive items compared to the more costly and toxic supplies most places want to sell us. Once again, Consumer Man is undermining my efforts. He goes out and buys blue toilet cleaner and foaming cleaner to use in his bathroom. But then Consumer Man turns around and saves paper to be printed on the reverse when it’s something he no longer needs. He also uses the backs of junk mail for pieces of scratch paper. It’s a battle with Consumer Man, but he’s giving in inch by inch without making a major effort. I think in the end frugality and greener living will win out without him even realizing what has happened.
May 16th, 2008 at 19:47
Thanks for the label ” Consumer Man” ! That certainly describes my husband. Gotta go fix my toilet now as I am the “resident” plumber in the family 🙂