Printer Postcript

As a follow-up to last night's post about printers, I now have three old, decommissioned printers packed away in their boxes in the basement. The space they are taking up isn't crucial but could be used to store other things. I was pondering what to do with them and remembered that A Proper Bostonian told me a couple of years ago that Best Buy accepts electronic items for recycling at no cost, even if you didn't buy the item from them.

The information is fairly accessible on their website: at the top of the page under Services there is a link for Recycle Your Old Products. There are some restrictions, which vary by state. Here in Massachusetts you can recycle up to three computer items per household per day. We will be sending our old printers on to their next lives this weekend.

However you feel about Best Buy as a corporate entity, this is an extremely useful and environmentally beneficial service and they are to be commended for offering it. Most electronic products contain a high percentage of components that can be reused or made into other things, but the materials need to be directed to the proper facilities for this to happen. Keeping old junk out of landfills benefits all of us in the long run.

Yard Work

Our next-door neighbor is having a tree removed from his yard today. It's located on the edge of his property between his garage and ours, but the bulk of it hung over our garage, so the tree service needed to use our driveway to get its bucket truck close enough.

As a result we've had a front-row seat for the whole endeavor since about 8:30 this morning. Right now they've swapped the bucket for a giant chipper to devour the branches. Parked in the narrow space between the two houses, it is extremely loud.

Ironed Out

I've discovered one annoyance with our new iron: once I have used it and turned it off, I have to unplug and replug it before it can be turned back on. I imagine this is meant as some sort of safety feature, but in daily use it becomes a nuisance.

I have not tried leaving the iron on and letting it shut off automatically to see if that makes any difference when turning it back on. I suspect it doesn't, but it's probably worth checking.

Iron, Man

Some months back, our iron of several years started misbehaving, dripping water on the garment being ironed seemingly at random. It was a basic iron we had bought at Costco for $30, and I think we'd had it six or seven years, so I figured we'd gotten our money's worth out of it.

I started thinking about what to replace it with, and I went to Amazon to read some reviews. After maybe half an hour I was dizzy, and felt like my brain was trying to stab itself. There were just far too many products, and every single one of them had at least one person who'd had a miserable experience with it and needed to vent about it. (This probably isn't news to those of you who shop online with any frequency, but people are much more likely to post negative reviews than positive ones.)

I decided the path of least resistance was to do what we'd done before; we went to Costco and I got the less expensive of the two irons they were carrying. It was a different $30 iron than the one we'd bought before, but it was the same brand, so I figured it would be all right. But a couple of months after we got it, I noticed that it wasn't generating steam properly. It was getting plenty hot enough but not making any steam, even on the highest steam setting. As a result, ironing a shirt was taking three times longer than usual.

I realized that we could still return the iron, thanks to Costco's generous return policy; for most items they sell other than electronics, there's no time limit on returns, as long as you have the receipt and don't abuse the privilege. That still left the question of what to get in its place. A Bed Bath & Beyond sale catalog arrived in the mail that same day, and inside was a basic iron, a different brand and $40 instead of $30. Conveniently there's a BB&B in the same shopping center as the Costco, so off we went. Costco even gave me the refund in cash, even though I'd made the purchase with my debit card.

I know there are people who swear by their $100 "professional" irons, and I did consider that option, but for the amount and type of ironing we do I believe a "regular" iron is sufficient. Some of the pro models are still made in Germany, however, instead of China, which is something I know some people like to be aware of (I'm one of them). If this new iron does turn out to be deficient in some way, I will most likely give in and get a pro model, but I'm hoping it won't come to that.

Huh?

Why does my dishwasher gel have a "best if used by" date? What would happen if it was past the date and I used it anyway?

Laundry Day

Yesterday was a day off for me, but my laundry pile had reached crisis proportions, so I spent most of the day doing laundry, and dutifully folding and putting away that laundry (really the more difficult part of the task to execute), and catching up on a few other miscellaneous tasks lingering from our pest control adventures last month. I apologize for not having anything fresh to post; my mind was elsewhere.