good with the bad . . .

i hate waste. i've always hated waste, which is precisely why - even as a child - i gravitated towards things like rebates (get paid for your trash); re-purposing (how to do two or more things with the same thing); and recycling (how to create something new from something old). where some people see only the final product, i see raw ingredients and materials. it's a running theme.

anyway, about a year ago i picked up a small can of decaffeinated coffee grounds. i really did not like the taste. roommate had no interest in decaf. well, i didn't want it just sitting there taking up space. that's wasteful. i didn't want to just toss it. that's wasteful. one can't use it for cooking (generally). and, quite frankly, you can't donate an open can of food to bon wille or out of the closet. my solution was to brew the coffee i didn't like with the coffee i did like, at a ratio of 1:3. it's worked quite nicely, and also stretched the good coffee by about 33%. so, not only can one add a bit of the bad with the good to use up some "mistakes," but one can also use it in reverse to stretch the good stuff and realize some savings without sacrificing taste. it's taken a while, but small things add up and the coffee can will be put in the blue bin this week. yea!

by analogy, we can do the same with our daily lives. if we've had something spoil our day, we can "brew it" with three equally good things in our day. that way, the bad thing won't just be taking up space - as ma used to say, "living rent free in the head." it takes looking at the spoiler and making the effort to add the three positive things. check your gratitude list: it may already be on hand.