We’re sending $2,512.50 to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund today, my friends. You guys rule.
Tag Archives: Attention: I have an important announcement
Day Five, as Plain as the Nose on Your Face
(I’m not saying that your nose is plain, per se, and honestly I never really look at it, I tend to take in your face as a whole. Speaking of which.)
I was helping my colleague look for songs about being sick and getting well for this week’s story time (It’s in 45 minutes! Go take a shower!) because in between reading picture books to the wee ones she teaches them little songs and finger plays. I must have Googled “sneeze + songs” because I ended up discovering a site for sneezing fetishists. Every night when I’m cuddling up with Jackson at bedtime he likes to ask me, “What did you learn today?” and normally I am happy to share all sorts of tidbits from the reference desk, but somehow I couldn’t find the words to try and explain why some people get secretly excited about a common bodily explosion. So we talked about voter fraud and looked at dog-shaming.com instead.
Today is the second and final day that our amazing anonymous donor will provide matching funds (up to $1,000) for your donations to the Red Cross through this site. I will continue to promise to send out drawings to $5 donors ($15 will get yours framed), but it’s the last day that your $5 will turn into $10 and your $15 into $30, and tomorrow is the last day for this whole donation-and-drawings drive on fussy.org. I’m working and traveling this week and won’t be able to keep up with it, but I will tell you that of this morning we are poised to send $1,320 to the Red Cross. I’ll add up the totals and get the final donation sent out on Wednesday morning. I am so pleased and honored and grateful that so many of you have been able to help out in this way.
Peewee Longstocking thanks you, too.
Day Four: A Miracle
Okay, kids, for days Four and Five of this month I have an anonymous donor who will match everything you contribute to my Charity Water/Red Cross fund, up to $1,000. If you send $5, I will draw almost whatever you want on a postcard and send it to you, and for $15 I’ll frame it, but more importantly, thanks to our anonymous friend, your $5 will magically turn into $10 and your $15 will swell into $30. It will all go straight to the Red Cross AND you’ll get the weirdest charity acknowledgment that I’ve ever heard of. Do it! It’s crazy and amazing that whatever you give will be doubled!
In other news, Friday was my — let’s see, we got married in 1996, so that means it was our sixteenth wedding anniversary. Holy shit, right? We’ve had our ups and downs — I’d go so far as to say that we’ve had entire years that weren’t a lot of fun — but things are pretty good right now. So to commemorate the union of one person who loves olives and one person who thinks olives are disgusting (but olive oil is fine, and even kalamata paste is do-able), the non-olive-lover (me) bestowed upon the olive lover (Jack) this handcrafted and badly photographed olive snuggling device:
(Jack got me flowers and sushi, which is exactly what I wanted.)
Of course I’m doing NaBloPoMo
I am going down to Camp Mighty next week and in order for them to let me in, I need to bring $200 with me to donate to Charity Water. Last year, the money raised by Camp Mighty attendees helped to bring fresh water to 1,000 people. This year, we’re giving to help build wells in Rwanda, where they will change people’s lives in ways I probably can’t accurately imagine.
However, in light of the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy on people from Cuba to Canada, some of whom are friends of mine, here’s what I’m going to do.
I’m asking you to donate whatever you can to my Charity Water/Hurricane Sandy combo plan. (I’m just the middleman, none of it goes into my wallet.) You can donate $1.00 if you want and I will thank you personally via e-mail and tell you how everyone envies what you’re doing with your hair. If you send me $5.00, I will draw almost whatever you want on a 3 x 5 postcard and send it to you. If you send me $15.00 I’ll frame it as a commemorative knick-knack ready for holiday giving. Below are some examples of what I’m willing to draw (i.e., nothing outright pornographic or disturbingly violent).(This is just stuff from my sketchbook. Your drawing will be brand new and just for you.)
Random California landscapes
Intergenerational laundry-doing
Old ladies thinking about sex
Spiritual beings
Hand lettering of the sentiment of your choice
A nerd in a kilt
Inexplicable channellings of the Universe
Whatever money I receive above the main $200 I need for Charity Water will go directly to the Red Cross, and I will match it dollar for dollar. UPDATE: I am matching for the first two days of donations only, and I’m sorry to cap it like that but I’ve raided my yoga retreat/shoe fund/art-supply-and-lunch-money piggy bank and, as of Saturday morning, that means we’re still sending almost $500 to the Red Cross. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS, KIDS. Keep donating and I’ll keep drawing and everything from now on will go directly to the Red Cross.
Here’s the PayPal button. You know what to do. Thanks for even considering it.
Moving
Posting will be light this week, as we’ll taking all of this . . .
over here . . .
. . . tomorrow.
I’ve just finished shredding five years’ worth of bank statements and I’m about to sort through a drawer full of cords that belong to electronics we haven’t used since the last Bush administration. I’m hoping to weed so relentlessly that all we’ll have to move will be our beds and a bag full of shoes. I’d start a Pinterest board about my new interest in possession-free lifestyles but I’m afraid it would be nothing more than an ode to freshly refinished wood floors, aesthetically challenging floor lamps, and Fluevogs. Actually, that sounds pretty good, I might do that anyway.
All of which is to say: posting will resume next week from our new location!
It’s OK, I can take it
I know you’ve been concerned about my inability to answer the world’s most benign question (“How are you?”), so you’ll be relieved to know that I’ve gotten over it. It wasn’t the incredible depth of my self-examination that brought me to enlightenment but the fact that three weeks of holidays/school vacation/no alone time, ever, were finally over. For a time, it was all I could do to arrange my face in into something resembling human civility. But now that order has been restored (my child is back in school! I had a week off of work! I doubled my morning coffee consumption!) my little human-relations problem seems to have resolved itself.
I didn’t manage to Popcorn Whisper this week, but I did post a thing over at The Stir where I use celebrities and E. B. White to explain Chinese astrology.
Even with only 12 signs, Chinese astrology runs on a 60-year cycle. Elements come into play (earth, fire, water, wood, and metal), as well as our old friends yin (female) and yang (male). So as we leave 2011, the year of the yin metal rabbit, 2012 will be the year of the yang water dragon, 2013 will be the year of the yin water snake, and so on forever until you don’t need to care anymore because you’ll be dead.
All right, I have to go, Coneheads is on.
Also, it’s Friday
Good morning! I have a small but important announcement, which is that I have three other posts up on other sites that might interest you.
If you go to this post about Christmas movies and to this post about my secret profane sweaty nerd boyfriend Louis CK, and then leave a comment on both of them, you may accidentally win a Dell computer. Yes, I’m doing this again because Dell seems to have extra computers lying around so why not give one to someone with the good taste and spare time to read my blog? Exactly. (UPDATE: we’re past the deadline and the computer’s been given away, but there might be something life-affirming for you there anyway.)
If you go to this post, on the other hand, you won’t win anything, but you may learn a thing or two about not losing your mind over the holidays. Plus, if I can get enough eyeballs on it I won’t lose my job over there. WIN-WIN.
Thank you for your kind attention. Have a wonderful day.
An Idea, an Announcement, and a Raffle!
First of all, every time I get into my car I have to hook up my iPhone to the car’s cassette adapter so I can listen to music or podcasts or whatever, and every time I do that I think, “Why can’t my car just be a giant iPod?” I mentioned this to Jackson the other day when I was driving him to school and he immediately flipped open the glove compartment.
“The keyboard could be here,” he said, miming typing on the flipped down glove compartment door.
“No, but then how am I going to control it from over here while I’m driving?” I said. “Maybe there could be buttons on the steering wheel.”
“No. Voice control,” he said. “Duh.”
“Oh, duh,” I said.
“PLAY! NICKELBACK!”
“DON’T! PLAY! NICKELBACK!”
Jackson delighted at the thought of us screaming at the car not to play what the other person in the car wanted to hear. Clearly the iCarPod would have to be wired to respond only to the voice of the person who made the last car payment.
Whip that up for me, would you Apple? Because with iCloud I can’t imagine why this wouldn’t be possible. I would dump my Volvo in a heartbeat for one that was basically a giant speaker on wheels.
Secondly, don’t forget that NaBloPoMo starts Tuesday! Oh, no! Even though I sold it to BlogHer last spring, I’m still going to post every day in November because what kind of a blogger would I be if I abandoned the very thing that once gave my life meaning, and also gave me an excuse to post pictures of all of my shoes?
Lastly, I’m going to Camp Mighty in a couple of weeks, not because I am ready to plow through my life list (I have fourteen things on it so far, none of which I particularly want to show anyone at the moment) but because Maggie is always creating something interesting and I like being a part of how it all plays out.
When I signed up there was an option to get a discount on the weekend if you raised $200 for a group called Charity: Water. So, I signed up for that, because saving money is always a thrill. And how hard could it be to raise $200?
It turns out that it’s sort of hard.
I have raised $50 so far by selling shoes on eBay, but I need to come up with another $150, so I’m following the lead of a few other Mighty Campers* and I’m trying a raffle.
Here is what you could win:
- A $50 Amazon gift certificate
- This necklace that I made out of random beads in my bead box:
3. An Instax Mini 25 instant camera and one roll of film:
4. A calligraphy kit!
All you have to do to enter is buy a $2.00 raffle ticket. You can buy as many as you want, and every dime of ticket money will go to Charity: Water. And yes, technically, by buying a raffle ticket you are helping my weekend in Palm Springs cost $200 less, and I completely understand if that rubs you the wrong way. But your $2.00 is going to an amazing cause, so I hope that knowledge rubs your fur back in the right direction.
The raffle will be open until midnight Friday, November 4, 2011. Thank you! Good luck!
THE RAFFLE IS OVER, THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO DONATED!
*As mentioned on Boston Mamas, some of our fellow and sister campers are fundraising creatively if you want to support them:
Specifically
Bike Swapping
First of all, congratulations to Autumnalyssa, who won the random drawing for a Let’s Panic! bag filled with all kinds of stuff, and whose mom taught her that you shouldn’t grow pot in the backyard if you have a gregarious six-year-old who might invite the mailman around to see her snail collection. Autumnalyssa’s mom might have been interested in talking to my mom, who tethered our dachshund in the backyard. Dachshunds + irrational barking = NO MAILMEN. I don’t know if dachshunds eat pot plants. Actually, never mind, they do.
Secondly, because I seem to have this need to blog all of a sudden but nothing in particular to say (WHY SHOULD THAT STOP ANYONE??), I will share with you my latest Craigslist selling success. And cause you to wonder why I did it, and for how much, and wouldn’t I have been so much happier keeping it?
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