Oops I did it again

Late November canning brought me with the need for more jelly jars for the treats I've been making for Christmas gifts. I was lucky to receive a few from colleagues and I bought all the jars of appropriate size from Goodwill, The OSU Folk Thrift Store, Cat's Meow and The Arc (every second hand store in town). Unfortunately, I still needed more jars. I hemmed and hawed about it for a day and then broke down and went to BiMart and bought two flats of the jars I'll need for the rest of my seasonal canning. Carrying those jars to the checkout gave me gut wrenching anxiety. It was so much easier to buy batteries since there is really no way to get around buying batteries if you need them. With the jars I just kept thinking, "What if I could have looked more places?" and "Maybe I should have visited Albany and looked in their thrift shops!" But I realized that I was tired of spending my time searching for used jars in town and had no desire to involve my car and fossil fuels in searching for jars at neighboring communities.

New items I purchased directly for a store in 2010.

When I got home I laid out all that I have purchased new over the past year and took a photo. Three items! What makes me amused is that if I hadn't taken the master food preserver class, I wouldn't have needed to purchase jars. Oh well. I guess it's a good lesson in the fact that you can't always plan for everything.

Second hand items purchased or found in 2010.

As a comparison I decided to pull a sample of the items I've found second hand this year and photograph those. It might seem like a lot, but I made a point to really think whether or not the item I was buying was something I actually needed. It worked in most cases, except when I saw something cool like an antique wooden bowl for $5 which I decided was a must have! Since It's a bit hard to see, here are the contents of the photo: a North Face down jacket (need), dustpan and brush (need- this was on my list for months!), cast iron fryer (need), Christmas lights (need) Irish cook book (want), dish towel (need), hair dryer that actually gets hot (need), clear Christmas ornaments (need - for crafty gift), wooden bowl (want), blue zinc lid canning jar (want), coffee burr grinder (needed by SteadyJ), backgammon game board (need so I can get good and win my friend HotDish), stone mortar and pestle (need), cute high heels (needed for job interview). 

I've just got 21 days left of my project and have got to make it through the final hump of a major holiday that involves finding gifts for nieces and nephews and putting together a cool gift for our family gift exchange. I'll admit it - it is getting difficult. Mostly because I have to be at work every day and second hand shopping takes a lot of time! I've been able to find some cool used stuff online though which has taken care of a lot of the big things on my list. I'll be sure to share how the Beg Barter Borrow holidays went in a few weeks!