Miscellany | Snoopy, Guinea Pig Costs, and Dinnerly

My Snoopy laptop decal

When you guys read my TurboTax post and saw the picture of my laptop with Snoopy on it, you wondered where I got it.

Well, Zoe bought it for me for Christmas, and I love it! My laptop is now the cutest one in the whole wide world.

This is the one she bought on Amazon. It’s $7 with free shipping, and there are all sorts of designs you can get with Snoopy and other Peanuts characters.

Some people complained about the decal being hard to apply, but I thought it was very easy.   So…just ignore those reviewers. 😉

Guinea Pig Upkeep

Reader Kim noticed that Sonia and Zoe have a fleece bedding setup for their guinea pig and she was wondering about the cost of   that plus guinea pig upkeep overall.

Sonia researched this fleece bedding idea before we adopted the pig, and I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical.   But it works out a lot better than I imagined.

Basically, you put puppy pads on the bottom of the cage and then lay polarfleece over top.

That way, you can easily scoop the poop every day, and the puppy pads below the fleece absorb the pee.

This means the pig has a clean and dry surface to live on, and I’d say the smell is much better than it is with regular bedding.

They bought a large box of puppy pads on Amazon for $16.99, and they still have a bunch left even after three months of using them.   So, this is definitely cheaper than using bedding.

The puppy pads have to be thrown away, but the fleece is infinitely reusable (they just wash it in the washing machine).

If you were previously composting your guinea pig bedding, then this is a more trash-producing option (albeit a cheaper one!).

But if you were throwing away your bedding before, then I don’t think this is going to be any worse on the trash-production front, and I think it just might produce a smaller volume of trash.

So, verdict on the fleece bedding: definitely cheaper, cleaner, and fresher smelling than regular bedding. But it might product more trash than regular bedding (assuming you’d compost it.)

Due to the design of our cage, the girls do have to pin the fleece along the edges of the cage, or Leslie manages to burrow underneath the fleece.   That’s a bit of a pain, but you wouldn’t necessarily need to do that with every kind of cage.

Aside from the puppy pads, Sonia and Zoe have to buy pellets and Timothy hay for Leslie.   Luckily, neither of these is very expensive. I’d venture to guess it costs less than $10/month for hay/pellets.

Their pig also eats fresh veggies, but that’s a very small cost (and I don’t make them pay for the veggies!).

Free shipping on Dinnerly

Remember when I posted about Dinnerly, a service that’s like Hello Fresh, but is half the price?

Well, they just sent me an email with a code that’ll give you free shipping on your first box.

Just click here, and then use code AW18DINFREE to get your free shipping.

(Here’s my full review of Dinnerly.)

And that concludes this edition of miscellany!