My Obsession

I have an obsession and I am not ashamed to admit it: I am obsessed with finding bargains. I cannot in good conscience pay full price for something that I know I can get for cheaper (unless I am absolutely desperate). Much to my husband's annoyance at times, I have the hardest time buying something at the store when I know that I can get a better deal if I wait for it to go on sale or if I can find it on ebay. This week I have been almost to the point of desperation, but just when I was about to break down and buy something for more than I wanted to (it was even on sale for 15% off at the store), a deal on ebay finally came through and I was saved from doing the unthinkable! What, you may ask, is the item that I needed? - a color ink cartridge for our printer.

This time of year is when I print out the family calendars for my family. I love making the calendars, even though they are very time consuming for a couple weeks out of the year. The problem with the family calendars is that it takes a LOT of ink to print 8 calendars with full-size color photos to go along with each of the 12 months, plus the cover. It usually takes one whole large color ink cartridge plus a little more. I like to have the extra ink cartridges on hand before this time of year comes so that I can be sure that I don't run out while I am printing. Well, this year I made a mistake. I knew that I had an extra color cartridge so I thought that I would be okay. So, I'm busy printing out the calendar pages when I get the low ink light from the printer. That always means that I can print several more pages though, so I continue to print until I notice a color change in the middle of printing a page. When that finally happened, I went to the closet to pull out the new ink cartridge and to my dismay I realized that it was the smaller cartridge which is HALF the size of a large cartridge. AAAAH!!! Needless to say, I was not very happy with myself. Why didn't I check a month ago and actually look at the cartridge to make sure that I had what I thought I had? I knew that this would not be enough to print out all of the calendars, so I quickly went to ebay and looked for a new one to bid on. These cartridges are NOT cheap and I can usually get one for about 1/2 price on ebay.

Unfortunately I did not win an auction until yesterday and I ran out of ink on the new cartridge yesterday. I almost went to the store and bought a new one, but I was able to get enough calendars printed out that I can mail them to everyone and print out my calendar next week when I get the new cartridge. Since I don't have to mail the calendar to myself, I will be able to finish it before the new month and have it up by February 1st (our calendars go from February - January so I don't have the mad rush of printing them at Christmas time).

P.S. - My husband said to me several times this week, "You know, you can just go to the store and buy one."
To which I think to myself, "Yes I can, but that would go against everything I believe in..."