Red Cross in Haiti (2008)

Want to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti?  Relief organizations need your help, but want donors to know that some kinds of help are definitely better than others.

InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based international non-governmental organizations (including the Center for International Disaster Information)gives these tips:

• Cash donations are widely recognized as the most efficient and effective means of relief in the established international disaster response community.

• While they may be well-intentioned, clothing, canned goods, and other in-kind donations are *not* the  preferred choice for humanitarian contributions to Haiti.  Consider reserving these kinds of donations for needs in your local community.

• Donate wisely!  Make sure your money goes to a credible responding agency for international emergencies.  InterAction is regularly updating this list of  member agencies who are responding to the earthquake.  For more information about how to choose a legitimate charity, visit www.give.org.

Good news!  The utility company has given us a couple months off its billing cycle.  The poor thing still can’t decide how to bill the Almostgotits, as our low meter readings always make it suspicious (we heat with wood).   

The only thing is, we got our woodstove a couple years too early to qualify for Obama’s 30% tax credit for energy efficiency.    Ah well, we ALMOST got it!!

Saving money and saving the planet make wonderful bedfellows, so here’s six ways you can do both, just for today:

1. Hang your laundry out to dry.  If you don’t have a clothes line, buy one or just tie a rope between a couple of trees.  Clothes dryers are one of the biggest consumers of a home’s total energy use.  And yes, you can even hang your clothes up indoors!
2. Skip Starbucks for a day and find an Earth Day event to do instead  (or)
3. Do a fun Earth Day project with your kids at home.
4. Plant a vegetable garden!  Tomatoes and beans are the easiest of all, grow practically anywhere, and your own, home-grown vegetable plants are so gorgeous and satisfying.  Plus also, you’ll have great tasting food for much less than what you’d pay at the store!
5. Stock your freezer.  You’ll save money and energy by reducing your trips to the grocery store.  You’ll also reduce the temptation to eat out (more car trips, more money spent) because you’ll have things to eat at home.  And finally, freezers use less energy when they’re full, too. 
6. Plug your TV into a power bar.  Many appliances draw electricity even when they are turned off, so using a power bar can make a real difference in energy savings.

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Related posts:

5 Ways to work greener & cheaper 

11 Ways to be cheap in honor of Earth Day

Laundry and spring break and blogging: oh my!

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It’s not difficult to find ham in Tennessee, but there’s plain old ham and there’s delicious, yummy, breathtakingly *good* ham.

So once a year or so, we have been in the habit of visiting a certain store which I shall not name here for legal reasons.

At Christmas and Easter, the lines are so long that the store moves its cash registers to a booth outside, and hires a police officer to manage the traffic going in and out of the small parking lot. I went a little earlier this year to get my ham, and had to stand in line anyway.

I shuffled past the displays of side dishes and flavored mustards, declined the free sample of smoked turkey breast, and finally arrived at the counter where I ordered a smallish half-ham. My mouth watered as the clerk presented me with the fragrant, foil-wrapped prize, which he opened for my inspection.

Ah.

“Yes, that will be fine,” I said, politely swallowing my drool. I only peeked at the price as I was walking to the teller. I had just selected a *FIFTY DOLLAR* ham.

$51.27, to be perfectly exact.

That’s 25 meals at a local homeless shelter. A week of groceries for some American families. Half a month’s wage in rural Russia. Two and a half flocks of ducks for Heifer project. A year’s worth of learning materials for 11.4 school children in Zimbabwe (or 5 school children in either Mozambique and Rwanda). Four complete sets of immunizations for children in Haiti.

And part of one wonderful, celebratory meal a year for eight good friends in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Do you struggle with things like this, too?

Here’s a brief topic: I went to Target the other day to pick up a waffle iron. I went in thinking a waffle iron costs somewhere in the $30-$50 range.

So, I saw the $70 stainless version and I saw the $20 version and a few in between. I picked up the $20 version feeling very happy with my purchase.

On the way out, I saw at the end of the isle a bunch of rejects and there I saw a similar waffle iron for $5.98. The box was crushed but the iron itself appeared to be in good condition. So, I returned the $20 iron to the shelf, selected the reject and made my way to the cashier. To my surprise they had discounted it further to $2.98.

I got out of there keeping $30-$2.98=$27.02 in my pocket. This is the additional portion of the price that I was willing to pay but ended up keeping for myself rather than adding to Target’s coffers.

What did Target do wrong, if anything? And, what do I do with the money I saved?

Very few of us will do the right thing, economically, unless we have to do it.

Doing the right thing because we have to do it still can be a positive experience.

Both Republicans (situationally) and Democrats (legislatively) believe in forcing people to do the right thing.

Republicans and Democrats take turns being right — and catastrophically wrong.

Maybe there are few definitive solutions at all.

Maybe there are more solutions than we can imagine.

Maybe most of us are getting poorer.

Maybe that doesn’t matter as much as we think it does.

Maybe we can’t make money doing the things that we love.

Maybe that will break our hearts.

Or maybe that will force us to discover how to love what we do, instead.

Maybe we’ll do everything right and still  fail.

Maybe we’ll make one mistake after another and turn out just fine.

Maybe life eventually will confound us all.

If we can’t support them, we need to get rid of them.

Top Tennessee economist Bill Fox, among many others, has already given us the hard numbers: sales tax collections do not ever keep up with economic growth, and thus are a terrible way to provide ongoing funding for anything, including public education. This is true even when the economy is in good shape: when it isn’t, consumer spending slows and tax collections plummet.

Dramatically.

Moreoever, the University of Tennessee, like many state universities, already receives less than 20% of its total funding from the state, even as it remains fully accountable to Nashville for every dollar it spends… including the millions that Nashville does not even provide.

Nor has UT ever done a very good job of presenting the seriousness of current and past funding cuts to the tax-paying public. A major barrier to reforming UT’s regressive funding structure is the persistant public perception that universities are rife with excess spending (or) that the whole point of a state university is to field a football team.

UT’s Development, Alumni and Communications offices are good at wearing orange but have always been too tentative about promoting UT academics, nor have they yet aimed high enough with their private fundraising goals.

So how about this: move the football team to Nashville and privatize the rest of UT — under a new name, of course. Let’s stop pretending that we can support, or that we even want, publically funded higher education.

Only a fraction of Tennessee’s taxpayers takes advantage of higher education in any case, so why should taxpayers pay for it, either? Why not reserve our tax money for other government projects (K-12 education? Public transporation?) — or even give it back to the people who earned it?

U.S. universities are still the best in the world, and one reason they are is that they are very good at raising their own money. Universities are also better than legislators at managing their own budgets and setting their own curricula, without state interference.

Why not let them?

Today I’m trying to organize a lot of elephants myself.  After a weekend with gas hitting $5 a gallon, followed by yesterday’s stock market crash, it occurs to me that I need to do a better job at saving money *and* retaining the few clients I currently have.  Nor is feeling like a limp noodle for a week or so any excuse (though yes, thank you, I’m feeling much better.)

So:  I started off the morning with several car-less errands to save gas*and* get my sloggy old elephant blood going.  Trotted to the vet for some flea meds, then to the drug store, then to the housewares outlet store, and finally to the market for dinner makings.  The chicken from the market went into the crockpot when I got home, and that’s to save some money. 

Cutting up and pulling the skin off a dead chicken — eww.  I’d forgotten about that part of cooking.   Usually I just buy skinless chicken breasts, and *that’s* when I actually cook anymore.  Why aren’t we all vegetarians, again? 

And for this afternoon:  phone calls, emails, and hunkering down with my word processor. 

How about you?  How are you responding to the economic news of late?

The dentist’s office called yesterday to remind me of my Cleaning scheduled for this morning.

I felt like a cross between a venereal disease and a Toyota.

Being scheduled for a Cleaning is far more serious than being scheduled for a mere Tune-Up, because of the many moral issues that are also at stake.

It’s so good of my dentist to employ these altar-(phone)calls for filthy reprobates like me.

Otherwise I may have spent the entire day chewing sticky candy and ice cubes instead, and have you read the news lately? Poor dental hygiene is now associated with everything from heart disease to Altzheimer’s. Plus, if you don’t floss, you are pretty definitely going to Hell.

But today? Verily I have been Cleaned, washed in the blood of flouride. They fumigated the Hell right out of me too, thank God, with a microbial gum wash that tasted, appropriately, like insect repellent — about a 97-proof DEET with just a hint of mint at the finish.

There was the Requisite Sermon on Flossing, my appropriate semi-annual dosing of guilt, followed by the deep, soul-cleansing pain of gouging and scraping.

Finally, I met with a spiritual counselor to go over my Personalized Treatment Plan which over the next two months will cost me approximately $50,000.

Have I mentioned here lately, at all, that I need a job?

Hallelujah and pass the pillow, it’s true.  We have a spanking new queen-sized mattress (with a new foundation to boot.) 

Our cancelled Tunisia plane ticket money has come through (mostly.  I am not, currently, a fan of Air France) which paid for the mattress.  And a new computer for our college-bound son. 

Who is moving into his dorm *early* as it turns out.  So I won’t have time to make him a giant flannel board, after all.

 My daughter started back to school today, leaving Almostgotit with an empty house all day again, and what to do next, she wonders?  (the local porn shop adult book store has a “help wanted” sign out front.  How much do you dare me?)

And here’s a little ethical dilemma.  My son has honored me by “friending” me on his Facebook profile, which means I can also read what he and all his other friends are saying to each other.  My policy is to be (almost) invisible, because I get much more information that way, of course!!  However, one of my son’s very active Facebook friends is the daughter of a friend of mine who has forbidden her daughter to use Facebook.   I’m not inclined to play the informer here, both because it would violate my son’s trust and because I think this girl’s parents need to make it their own responsibility to better engage, support, and monitor their daughter.  Besides, it’s only Facebook:   I mean, I would tell them if she were smoking pot.  What do you think, readers?

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Related post:
Once Several Times Upon a Mattress