Saving on Printers, Ink and Toner

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.

Survival Books

While shopping today - my goodness we spent a lot of time and money in the stores today! - I found two new books that cover survival topics and my paranoid self decided I should buy them and read up on the subject.

The first book is called, “Survival Wisdom and Know-How,” which is everything you need to know to survive in the wilderness.

The second book is called, “Country Wisdom and Know-How,” which is everything you need to know to live off the land.

Both books are about 500 pages of no nonsense information on vital subjects. I can’t wait to have an hour outside on the porch swing to read through one and see how much I don’t know about the basics of survival without our modern conveniences.

On the Farm

If I was to have a farm somewhere, I wonder what I would want to grow? My grandfather grew corn to sell at market, raised cows and pigs, and had a huge vegetable garden to supply the family. He died riding his tractor in the fields of a heart attack, and no one knew until he was late coming in for dinner. At least he was doing something that he loved.

I have been thinking about possibly growing cantalopes or sugar. I was inspired by the TV series called Cane and have been looking into sugar production. There are many things that I didn’t realize until I started this research on the internet. For example, the largest sugar producing nation in the world is Brazil.

The subtropical climate of middle and southeastern Brazil makes the perfect setting for growing sugar cane. Did you know that sugar needs between 12 and 16 months to grow between planting and harvest?

Of all the different types of sugar, Brazil has become famous for their production of VHP sugar, which has the highest concentration of pure sucrose. And of great importance to an oil-starved world, a lot of sugar is converted into ethanol and used as fuel. I like the thought of a renewable energy source and all the things that are made with sugar. This might be my future in farming!

Beach Babies

Our preteen daughter took me by surprise today and announced that she’s bummed out about the school year ending soon and that she’s afraid the long hot summer is going to be boring for her.

First of all, I NEVER felt that way - I ALWAYS looked forward to summer and not having to go to school. So mustering up any empathy is very hard to do.

Second of all, we always ratchet up the activity level during the summer - we take the kids on a lot of weekend adventures and manage to find ways to keep them occupied during the week, too. So why she feels she will be bored, I can’t tell you.

Some of her friends are going away to summer camps over various weeks of the summer - maybe she is feeling left out of that. Most of the teen summer camps seem to be quite a distance from home, which isn’t really a problem but was something we didn’t want to pursue when she was younger. But maybe she is ready for an overnight camp now that she is 12.

As much as our family loves the beach and water sports, I suggested that she go try a surf camp at a North Carolina beach. She actually seems interested in surfing lessons, so I showed her the web site for the Wrightsville Beach NC Surf Camp, which has “Adventure Teen Camps” and teaches the kids about the coastal marine environment as well as how to surf.

If they have an opening for a session after the Fourth of July week, then we can send our daughter to the beach and maybe even find something for our son, too.

Bees and Wasps

For some reason my yard is full of bumblebees this year. I noticed a couple of them about 2 weeks ago hovering around the rose bush by my mailbox. Then a couple days ago I noticed there were 5 or 6 bumblebee buzzing around the rose bush. Of course, the rose bush is in full bloom right now, so it is obviously very attractive to bees. But I do not remember seeing so many of them buzzing this bush last year.

There is a new wasp nest in the soffit of my roof, just around the corner from my front door. I have seen 3 or 4 red wasps flying about the yard this week, but I couldn’t find the nest. But this morning as I was going out to get the Sunday newspaper, I noticed a wasp flying over my head and as I tracked him with my eyes I noticed the next tucked away in the soffit. So next time I’m at the hardware store I’ll have to pick up a can of wasp killer and take out that nest. I can put up with the bumbleebees as eco-friendly gesture but I can’t abide the red wasps.