Of course, if you are mainly talking about saving the material (and you might want to save that separate from the object ... whether a mesh or a primitive ... you just select the object, click on M, bring up your presets library and save the material in one of the categories. By the way, I suppose you all know that you can create addtional folders for materials and switch back and forth? (I often do that when I am working on a large project and want to have all of my materials for that project in a separate location). You switch floders by going to the little arrow at the bottom of the materials screen (the one that brings up Watchful Eye and other third party materials).

Could be worse, could be raining.