Some hard decisions and some good things.

Fabulous! My toad lily has been blooming for the past two days, and here's a pic of one of the blooms. What I think is absolutely wonderful about it is that it's got blue on it. Not the wannabe blues that you see on most flowers, but true blue, dyed in the wool BLUE. I'm lovin' it lots. This is now my favorite flower, I think.

Besides that, I made the difficult decision today to cut back on the amount of recycled packing materials I use. A guy on freecycle asked if anyone had any spares, so I bit the bullet and put two large boxes out for him. He shreds them and uses them for other packing needs, so they're not just getting thrown away.

Most of them were too old and fragile to be reliable. His request came at a great time, because I'd already decided to stop using the ones in good shape. Why? you ask. Because, after three months of charting postage costs for private trades, I've found that reused bubble mailers increase the postage cost somewhere in the area of .16-.55 a mailer.

While it hurt, it seems like a good business decision and a good healthy home decision. I eliminated a large, ugly clutter that made me avoid my sewing room, and I'll now be able to reduce my shipping costs.

And the sugar on top is that I don't have to be concerned whether people are put off an old mailer, even if it was safe to ship in, and I don't have to worry about throwing away mailers I receive -- cuz I got the hookup, now. He gave me another box and told me that, as soon as I fill it up, he'd be happy to come and pick it up again.

As soon as I use up the stock of new mailers that I've been hoarding, I'll invest in some new bubble wrap and start making my own mailers to send my seeds. Using salvage plastics and saving money is even better than saving money! :)