Yoghurt cups: Recycle and reuse

Yoghurt cups are just perfect for reuse and recycling. Nice tumbler like shape, they usually come with a cap and are sturdy enough for most household storage. I use them atleast 4-5 times before I say goodbye to any of those. Here're a few things I use them for:

For storing leftover dough, cut vegetables or leftovers in the fridge.

For keeping lentils and beans for germination. (Go here for my post on sprouted beans)

For storing knick-knacks like buttons, coins etc.

For mixing my various homemade hair and face masks. They are handy because lot of these recipe call for yoghurt and I just use a yoghurt cup with last bit of yoghurt in it and then just toss it after I'm done. That way I don't even need to wash the cup before reusing it.

A lot of my yoghurt cups end up in my container garden, I use them for growing seeds or just plant a couple of small plants with smaller life span. The picture I have shows fenugreek plants in the cups. Fenugreek is a popular Indian herb which is used a lot in Indian cuisine.

Celebrating 4$/Gallon gas - One less round trip a day

Crystal at Money Saving Mom, has asked readers for reasons to celebrate 4$/gallon gas price. It may sound strange, but rising fuel costs are motivating people to reconsider their choices in transportation and commute, and more and more people are modifying their lifestyle to use less of gas and more of other environment friendly options. Which IS a reason to celebrate.
So what's my change?
I work pretty close to my home (about half a mile) and my husband works within 2 miles of our home. Of late we picked up a strange habit. We started going home for tea ( or Chai as it is known in India) in the afternoons. Both of us love tea as it is prepared in India, and we usually don't like the version we can get in our offices. I don't know how we made a habit of it, but it started with me sometimes feeling sleepy during office hours and asking my husband to take me home for a tea, which he gladly obliged. It felt nice to have a 15 minutes break during the largely monotonous office hours, but the cost was much higher then we could understand initially.
A round trip home would mean a 4 mile extra trip everyday. It also stole some time from our life, because we will stay longer in the office to compensate the half hour, which we spent while going out for tea. Soon, it started showing up as the difference it made to our monthly gas expense.
So from last week I have decided to be firm and say no to this urge of going home for tea. I'm happy to report that I haven't gone home(in the afternoon) all of last week and this monday. It also helped me cut down my overall intake of tea by half. Since I was firm on saying no, my husband has also stopped going.
Yay! for myself and hubby.

Win win strategy

Rarely does one stumbles upon something thats good for the personal finance, earth and saves time too, I found one such thing today.

Yesterday, while hubby was ironing his shirts he complained about how wrinkled the clothes are and how difficult it was to iron them. That once again reminded me of my plan of line drying clothes instead of machine drying them. I remembered how we used to do that back in India, and the shirts were good to go with the minimum effort in ironing. I wanted to give it a spin here since we have a front yard now, but just never got around to actually doing it. I told BEB about my thoughts and he agreed that it sounded a good idea.

So today, we took all the bigger dirty clothes and washed them in the machine. Once they were done, we took them out and line dried them in our front yard. In a couple of hours all of them were dry, fresh and clean.

Since we live in an apartment where we pay per wash/ dry cycle. We saved some money( albeit small) by line drying. It was good for mother earth. Since we didn't need to wait for the dryer to finish drying, it saved us sometime too. So hubby was happy, I'm happy, our pocketbook is happy and hopefully mother earth is happy too.
Now thats what I call a win-win strategy !!!