Monthly Archives: June 2008

Milky Way Farms

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There’s a little town in southern Tennessee that has a lot of history. One of the better histories has to do with the man who invented the Milky Way bar and founded the Mars Candy Company, Frank C. Mars.

Frank and his wife, Ethel, bought a farm in Pulaski, TN and named it the Milky Way Farm. They bought all the adjoining land that they could over the years and ended up with almost 3,000 acres. They bred saddle horses, race horses and cattle on the farm, built a horse race track on the property, and their stables were the home the 1940  Kentucky Derby winner, Gallahadian, as well as many other champion thoroughbreds.

When the Snickers bar was invented by the Mars Candy Company, Frank named the candy bar after one of his horses.

The home they built on this estate was 25,000 square feet and had 21 bedrooms. The property also had 30 barns, 70 cottages and many outbuildings, including the famous “Crooked Sheep Barn.”

The property is now owned by a developer from South Carolina who is turning about 1,000 acres of the estate into a gated community and upscale village.

Saving on Printers, Ink and Toner

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My home office has my desktop PC and two printers hooked up to it. The first printer is a little HP color inkjet printer that does a decent job on photos and anything that has to be color. But the real workhorse in my office is an HP monochorome laserjet that prints only black and white papers and man, does it print them fast and cheap.

I have to print out reports every night of the week except Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that’s a lot of printing. The color printer would take up to three hours to print the reports and since they are just black and white it occurred to me that I should look into get a monochrome printer that is faster. The fast color printers are just too expensive for my home office budget. So I found the HP laserjet and discovered a little bonus – the laser toner cartridge lasts 6 times longer than the inkjet cartridges.

The inkjets were running out every week of one color or another, especially the black cartridge. I could easily go through two black cartridges each week. But the laserjet toner cartridge lasts about one month. Of course the price difference is huge. You can buy inkjets for $20-$30 at the discount stores but the laser runs $80. But the yield is much greater than the increased cost, so I’m saving a lot of money and time with the laser.

Trying to pinch my pennies even further, I decided to check out the generic cartridges and also getting refilled or recycled cartridges. If I know I can recycle something I feel guilty tossing it into the trash and not recycling. There’s been so much buzz about recycling printer cartridges that I knew I had to start doing that. So I surfed the internet and found a cool site called Inkjet Deals. They have information refilling both inkjet cartridges and laser toner cartridges for my HP laserjet and all the top brands of printers.

I like the sectio on their site that is a resource center with informational articles. After I read the one about “Generic and Remanufactured Cartridges,” I knew right then that I must start recycling my cartridges and also spread the word so everyone else will do that, too.

Another article they have that helped me with the penny pinching mode is called, “Seven Tips for Saving Ink.” Now some of those tips might be obvious to you, but I hadn’t thought of them until this article pointed them out.

I’m also not sure that I’m going to keep my HP color inkjet. After reading this site and learning more about printers, I might be better off buying a different brand for the photos I want to print. I’m seriously thinking about shopping around for the right site to buy Epson color printers online for less money than the local discount stores and getting a better quality photo print for my collection.

ConAgra, Publix and Home Depot

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While standing at the customer service desk in Publix I noticed a little pad of coupons on the counter and pulled one off. This coupon turns out to be a pretty cool deal from ConAgra Foods, Publix and Home Depot.

The deal is that you buy $20 worth of ConAgra brand foods from Publix and send in the coupon with the Publix receipt for those groceries and they send you back a Home Depot gift card worth $25. Now, you do the math. Spend $20 plus a stamp and get back $25. That’s a sweet deal and not that hard to do. ConAgra makes a lot of big brands that everyone recognizes and uses, like:

  • Hunts (ketchup, spaghetti sauce, etc.)
  • Libby (hash, canned corned beef, etc.)
  • Chef Boyardee
  • Peter Pan Peanut Butter
  • Van Camps (pork and beans, weenie beanies, etc.)
  • Slim Jim
  • Reddi Whip
  • Crunch ‘n Munch
  • Gulden’s Mustard

and probably a few more that I forgot to list. But come on – how hard is it to spend $20 on any of the above groceries?

I don’t know where you are supposed to get these coupons from, but I found mine at the customer service desk – so if you want to take advantage of this you should head out to Publix ASAP because it expires June 29.

Taking Care of Dad

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My sister called today and wanted to talk about Dad and his declining health. Now Dad is going on 70 and had a hard, blue collar life, so his body is about worn out. Thankfully the union is covering all his medical expenses and he has a decent retirement fund. He’s still living in his own home and still drives, so he’s pretty independent in many ways. With my sister being the main caregiver of the family, her calling me about him was a little alarming.

Turns out it’s not really an emergency or anything all that hairy. She is frustrated with his refusal to do certain things the doctors want him to do and she called me to ask for some support in persuading him to cooperate. On the other hand, the subject is a little touchy and it is hard to start parenting your own parent.

Gas Prices Across the U. S.

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Found a very cool internet tool on Gas Buddy that shows a map of the entire U.S. broken down into counties and color coded to show the current cost of gas in each county. It is amazing to see the huge disparity in the cost of gas, with the highest costs always seeming to be in California and along the west coast, including Washington, Oregon, Nevada and then over to New York on the east coast, and surprisingly, Maine is very high, too.

At the moment the three cheapest states include Missouri, Oklahoma and South Carolina.

There is also a map that show the cost of gas across Canada.

Check out the U. S. National Gas Temperature map for yourself – isn’t it cool?