FB Comments Q&A

Before we begin, doesn’t this look great?

Look at these slices (er.. the 4th one was snatched up before the picture was taken) of his delicious, homemade bacon fermier & cheese pizza.

Ate. Every. Slice.

All right!

Anonymous wanted to have more tips on where to find futons to buy & try them out

To be honest, you have to go to your local futon store. I’d invite you over to touch my futons (oo dirty!), but you know, being Anonymous and all, it might be a problem.

I’d try doing a Google search for futon stores in your area. Hopefully they’ll have some in stock for you to lie on and roll around on, but there’s no guarantees.

Most likely, you will find stores that show you a little plastic covered sample of what it looks and feels like on the inside.

This is what we felt in the stores, and BF just chose the thickness he wanted. I suggest to buy a futon a bit thicker than you’d want, because the organic cotton (if you go that route) DOES compress down a bit.

You can also bite the bullet and just ask them to order in a “Japanese futon” from their futon catalog, and you’ll know what it’s like.

Er.. order the small size. Those babies are heavy to carry and you WILL need help to carry them.

Viro wants to remind everyone that paying the full $100 for a hooker is not wasted cash.

*salutes* Whatever floats your boat.

Metscan says: Isn’t sleeping on the floor drafty? And if it was drafty, could it be placed on a platform?

I haven’t found it drafty at all, but then again.. we live in apartments. We don’t have a lot of doors that have spaces underneath to have a draft come through.

With that being said, I also really love to sleep in cold temperatures. The colder it is, the better I sleep.

So I can’t really answer this question from experience, but a platform would be a good idea if you are concerned about drafts.

b|u 3: wondered if Cost-co really was cheaper, compared to the Asian supermarkets for groceries

Short answer: No. Nothing is cheaper than ethnic grocery stores.

Long answer: Interestingly, Cost-co is meant to be quite cheap for staples like milk and such, but we’ve found that in Quebec specifically, the dairy producers here have a controlling hand on the market.

We’ve checked in Toronto and the price of milk was a LOT cheaper. We wanted to buy a huge crate of it to truck it back to Quebec, but thought the better of it.

Milk is about the same price at a minimum, in all grocery stores across Montreal (don’t know if you’ve noticed that). Some places that are more ‘premium’, charge more for milk, but they never seem to go below a certain threshold.

In fact, the local Cost-co here posted a sign saying that they would LOVE to price the milk lower, but they can’t, so they’re going to donate the difference they were going to chop the price by to a charity instead. :\

Where we really save the money is on bulk toiletries such as toilet paper, products like boots that you can’t find anywhere else, cheap clothing, contact lens solution at $15.49 instead of $19.99 at Pharmaprix, etc…

So groceries? Not so much. But the quality might be a tad bit better than in an Asian supermarket. Not as bruised for example.

Lisa Joy wanted to know how much I pay for contact lenses..

A quick note — I checked in Cost-co for my brand of contact lenses and they didn’t carry them. But the brands that they DO carry, are quite comparable in price to the online contact lens sites that I favour.

I pay about $17 – $20 for a single box of 6 lenses, when they would normally cost $25 – $30 in an optician’s store.

When I recently bought 8 packs (4 for my right eye, 4 for my left), the total came up to $147.76, including shipping and taxes, plus a discount I scored by searching Retailmenot.com.

That works out to about $18.47 per box, taxes and shipping included.

I still use VisionDirect.com. I have tried checking other sites like ClearlyContacts.ca but after painstakingly reviewing 8 websites and calculating the price per unit, including shipping & taxes, VisionDirect had my brand for the cheapest out of the lot by about $0.30 per box.

Emma reminded me that my fridge is also plugged in
(sorry.. I hide it in the closet and when I wrote the post I forgot about it)

Yes. My fridge is plugged in, and so is my oven. Thanks for the reminder!

And here are the pictures I promised, which .. are what I said — everything is plugged into power strips like this:

So for the particular picture above, we turn it on and off each time we use the microwave instead of just leaving it on.

We also have a little nightlight in the bathroom so that we can see (dimly) enough to reach the toilet, but without having to flood the bathroom in light to wake ourselves up, or to have the need to turn on the lights at all.

Anonymous #3 didn’t think that buying powerstrips to turn everything on and off was worth it

Great point.

But we had the powerstrips lying around anyway. So we just used what we had.

You can also buy powerstrips for very cheap. Around $5 at a dollar store or less (I think I saw one for $3), and if you save more than $5 a month just by switching on and off items that suck power during the night, then I think it’s a good lifetime purchase.

Even if we don’t recoup the cash for a whole year, I like knowing that I am using as little electricity as possible,
to conserve and save the environment.

We’ll know by the end of next month how much we have saved in utilities.

We were already only paying around $24 a month in utilities, total ($12 per person), so to drop it down even further than that is kind of challenging 🙂

I also want to thank Phil @ The Consumerist for featuring my article on their website, and @geekinheels for tipping me off that I was featured.