Babe, the Blue Cow Named in Honor of Paul Bunyan's Ox

Martin LaBar via Flickr (cc)

I'm going to love Babe - reminds me of the tall tales about this lumberjack. Babe the Blue Ox, Bunyan's companion, was a massive creature with exceptional strength Paul supposedly created the Great Lakes so Babe could have a pond to drink out it.

I'm willing to be that most of you would have thought that it was a tall tale (or a load of bull) that we would buy 20 cows in just over one year through a "giving-small" project.

I had no idea if I could get one cow let alone enough to be one big blue ox.

If we put all these cows together (20 of them) x 1000 pounds we would have 20,000 lb cow or ox, probably the size of Babe.

Moo-valous Garage Sale Pays Off : Blink and You'll Miss Cow Twenty

Don't blink now - but this Argos (cow #20) passing through.

pietroizzo via Flickr (cc)

Many thanks to all the garage sale helpers - Beth, Urve, Kyle, Julie, Earl, Austin and Alan and the Street Cat Rescue group. Thanks to everyone who donated stuff.

Okay - I have never done a garage sale with this much stuff ... I had no idea how much stuff I had accumulated. More 1000 books easily ... a few hundred cow items and that's the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks to Urve, I had tables, lots of tables.

The big surprises were the RAOK (Random Acts of Kindness) - one neighbor sent her wee son over to hand me $20 for the cow as a donation. Wow! At the very end of the day, when I was tuckered out and packing up, out of the blue someone pulls up and says now these are "garage sale prices". I explain it was for charity and he pulls out his wallet and peels out two twenty dollar bills for the cow. Then he really made my day - he took the headboard. LOL ... I could have paid him $20 (just kidding) but seeing a big furniture item walk off was great.

The Big Scoop on the Moovalous Sale - $380.52

Photo from Ebay sale for Ice Cream fairy dish
We made $380.52 including $61 in donations. So a cow and third almost. Moo hoo! I also have reclaimed scads of space. Our left overs are going to SCAT and I have kept about 3 boxes of stuff to post on Kijiji.

Annabelle is Out of the Barn - At Last

Photo by margo_rita369 via Flickr

I started to think Annabelle was stuck to the barn like this cow. Finally, she's off to Bangaldesh to help a family.

Special thanks to Vicki and Paul for their large Sarcan contribution that tipped us over the edge.

Cow #19 is done and I suspect Cow #20 - Argos - could be quick indeed with the Moo-valous Garage Sale coming soon.

Springing Ahead - Cow and "Cow Equivalents"

I can't believe it's a month since I've posted. The bottles have been flowing in - thanks to Norma and Brett, Celeste, my neighbors Sue, Kyle and his family, D&D crowd, Cheryl, Vicki and Paul, Cathy and Lyle, Peter and Barb, the Archives and Special Collections Staff, Research Services main floor office, Natural Sciences Library, Dean's Office, and Information Technology Services.

I took about 6 weeks off posting to Kijiji and have restarted at a slower pace. I am accumulating more and more books as Kijiji isn't a great venue to sell these. Soon the books will take over.

The Bottom Line:

The cow and "cow equivalents" are chugging merrily along with bottles, coupons, Canadian Tire money, points donations, garage sale items etc.

What do I mean by "cow equivalents"?

Well based on the poll about helping out locally with coupons and from talking to folks, people seems to think it was okay if I put aside $15-$20/week to try to pick up deals on food and shelter items. My goal is to get to the point where for $15 we get at least $30 to $60 dollars worth of food/tiems.

So I have been putting my coupon know-how to work and purchasing things for the Food Bank, YWCA Shelter and Aids/Homeless center. When the amount I spend equals $300 (the cost of the cow) that's a cow equivalent.

So we have our first "cow equivalent". And we've almost got Annabelle - cow #19.

I try to use the Shoppers points for the cow when I can but this requires finding people to "shop" on the redemption day and shop ALOT. The last redemption day there were no cow supporters eager to shop at Shoppers so I used the Shopper's Bonus redemption to buy baby formula.

Here's a few examples of what I've bought.

6 Cans of formula powder plus 2 small flats of "instant" formula. Each can is about $30 each.

For those of you who are Shopper Optimum point gurus - I used 75,000 points for $200 and earned 18,000 points toward the next redemption.




Dawn Dish Soap - 33 cents/each after coupons


Two Tubs of Cereal and Nutrigrain Bars (ignore Eggos) - $2.97 for all after coupons



14 Reach Toothbrushes - paid just the tax after coupons



Shampoo and Conditioner - on sale for $2 each but each had Shopper's Bonus points equivalent to about 75% of their cost.



Liptons Sidekicks and Lipton Cup a Soup Deal - Spent 75*10 Sidekicks ($7.50) after coupons, plus 10*$0.53= $5.30 after coupons for the Cup a Soups. Cup a Soups are regularly at $1.97 to $2.29 at Shopper's




3 Chunky Soups and 6 Gardenay for $2.97 after coupons



Stayfree and Feminine Products - 99 cents each after coupon, plus tax

There is a coupon for Stayfree $2 off and they go on sale fairly often for $2.99 so I buy a few to donate.



Best Deal of All: Huggies Good Nites - just the tax $0.97, normally $7.99/each plus tax


Other Donations

During the winter I started gifting clothing, household linens and items to the Homeless shelter if I couldn't sell them. I estimate that about 50 boxes have been gifted and their clothing depot is running low all the time. They look for clothes in season.

I also gave some of the free paper towels (from a coupon deal) to the Street Cat Rescue Group and some to the shelter. I had about 20 packages.



So keep saving coupon flyers for me everyone. Special thanks to Urve, Lorraine and Rob who have kept them all for me.

Coupon trading for the cow is still going on but it's micro-donating ... a few cents here or there. After 4.5 months, I have raised $117.35 for the cow. Definitely better to use these coupons locally to help food bank and shelters.