Amasi, I assume it was a chest freezer? I've seen people on my local Freecycle asking for non-working freezers to store grain in (presumably for in a barn) because it helps keep vermin out. If you're within driving distance of a rural area, you may be able to find someone who will come pick it up!
It's a very large upright freezer. I've already tried putting it on my local free stuff page. I've also tried emailing the local scrap metal place to see if they'd pick it up, but got no reply. It may be time to try again
A few years ago, before the show Hoarders, there was a show called Clean House starring Niecy Nash. One episode involved a young married couple and their house, overrun with "treasures" her family kept dumping on them. It sounded as though the family were all hoarders and now that there was new "free" space, they were going to fill it up. As an example, I remember someone had been driving along the highway and had seen a golf bag and stopped, picked it up and brought it to their house. The clubs were all bent and totally unusable. They felt like they couldn't get rid of it because it would be "mean" or "rude". Niecy pointed out that her family was being incredibly rude and presumptuous to foist junk, BROKEN junk, on them and take over their home as a dumping ground. And honestly, the house and yard looked like a dump, a real dump. Niecy basically told them to grow spines and refuse to allow this behavior to continue.
Yes I think spine is the key here. I'm working on it!
I needed to read this. When my inlaws were here earlier this month, I was "given" six jars of homecanned food. I have no problem with homecanned foods at all, my pantry is full of things I've canned. However, the newest of these jars is from 2011, the oldest, 2005, and that is orange cucumber relish, not something we'd eat at all. The rest of the canned goods are strange food combos or food that I question the quality of before it was canned. We will not eat them at all, I know to be polite (even though they are gone) I will stick them in my pantry and then curse them whenever I can't put something else away, so in the garbage they will go.
You're lucky! Mine weren't even dated! Every so often a jar of home canned pickled onions will turn up. I'm sure they must be about a decade old by now, and they have bright green spots all over them...I throw em out whenever they end up in my hands but they keep turning up.
Yeah, my dad comes from a family of hoarders. He and his brothers all married women who are either anti-hoarders or good at organizing, which is probably the only thing that saved them. Sometimes the symptoms of being a hoarder and being a cheapskate are the same--collecting plasticware, napkins, and condiment packages from restaurants, for example. In my mind, the hoarder never ends up using all the napkins they've collected, while the cheapskate uses them them for everything, even stuff that's kind of dicey, like baby diapers and toilet paper and gift wrap. I think the cheapskate actually has to save money, on the surface anyway, from not buying diapers and toilet paper and gift wrap in order to feel good; while the hoarder feels good because they've got this huge pile of napkins, which probably gets dirty and unusable before they can ever be used. That's my take on it, anyway.
I think this is quite accurate. I try to be careful to follow through when I set out to be thrifty. For example, I read a thread here about making your own stock from vege scraps, and since I always feel guilty about throwing "good" parts of veges in the compost, and I love making soup, I thought it was a brilliant idea. And then I had visions of myself collecting 800 containers of scraps and never making any stock. Luckily, I don't have the freezer space for that, and I've been regularly making up stocks. And no, I haven't told my family I've found a use for food scraps
Another example of attempted thrift thwarted by lack of follow through. When my parents moved into their current house, the room they chose for me was unfinished. Most of the saga is irrelevant, but the room had two windows, one looking into the garage and one onto the back yard. They acquired a curtain from somewhere for my garage window, which didn't quite fit so wouldn't close all the way. They also decided to make the curtains for my large garden window. Fair enough. And they did make...one of the pair. Alone, it only covered 2/3 of the window, so I spent my teenage years carefully hiding whenever I wanted to change clothes. It's still like that.
Topic: Cheapskate stories (Read 514583 times)