Freecycle vs. Donate

I’m a big fan of Freecycle. I’m subscribed to two groups for my area. Being that it’s tax season right now, it’s on the forefront of my DH’s mind that we get no tax benefit from freecycling. It’s an unfortunate consequence of the US tax code that we get no tax benefit from directly giving stuff to someone who needs it versus giving it to a third party (so that they can theoretically get it to someone who needs it). I know the limitations are there to prevent abuse, and I certainly can’t come up with an abuse-proof (within reason) way to manage it in taxes. Freecycle is necessarily minimalistic in terms of administration.

So, it presents this dilemma as to when to freecycle and when to donate. Me personally, donating doesn’t please me. We did a donation of stuff yesterday to Goodwill, but it didn’t make me feel good the way freecycling does. When I freecycle, I know that the person who is getting the item wants it and will likely use it (or give it to someone who will). The person has gone to the effort of coming to me at my convenience to get the item, which proves some level of commitment. Oh, and I’m lazy, so that I have to do nothing but post and manage some e-mail to get my stuff gone makes me happy. When we donate stuff to other places, it requires effort on our part to bring the stuff to somewhere and/or to package the stuff up, and the donation is at the convenience of the receiving party. Thus, it does not appease my lazy side. It also represents no commitment on the part of the recipient and thus I have little trust in their interest in my items. I suspect that some percentage of the stuff that I give to these places will get trashed or misappropriated. In the case of our Goodwill donation, it will go through some level of processing and then go to a shelf where it will sit for some period of time with a price tag on it, waiting for someone to be willing to buy it. I don’t love the idea of my stuff getting sold (even for a good cause) instead of going freely to a person who needs it. Freecycle (my groups at least) strictly manage re-sellers. Re-sellers have to state that their plan is to re-sell the item in their request for the item, and if someone is caught re-selling freecycle items, they get banned from the group. There’s also the personal interaction that helps me to know that the item is being used, not sold. For example, I freecycled Scott’s old (really old) ski boots yesterday, with his permission, and the woman who picked them up was thrilled with them, tried them on as soon as she got home, and dropped me a note letting me know that they fit perfectly. That’s pretty cool to me, and it makes me happy to know that our stuff isn’t going to waste or ending up in a landfill (at least for the time being).

Unfortunately, we need every bit of tax help we can get, so I’m going to have to suck it up and start donating instead of freecycling. With that in mind, how do you decide when to freecycle versus donate? Is it a pure valuation of the item? Do you only freecycle items that you can’t easily donate? Or is there some other criteria you use?

Bridge Points

Color – Total – YTD
Gold – 34.37 – 17.93
Red – 78.38 – 13.11
Silver – 63.78 – 6.26
Black – 13.45 – 0.00
Online – 56.80 – 0.28

My Next Rank Is Life Master, and I need 53.22 more masterpoints, 36.55 of which must be Black Points.

Information about what the colors mean – Short story is that gold is the color that usually holds people up from being life master, as it’s the hardest to get. But, for me, I’ve got gold coming out of my ears, so to speak…I’m just short on points from club games, because we don’t have a club convenient to us and thus we never go

Slate on Webkinz

Do Stuffed Animals Have Souls? on Slate.com

Six Month Anniversary

Today is the six month anniversary of me getting braces. Original plan was that I’d be getting impressions done for my retainer next week, but there was a problem while we were at the NABC in Detroit. One of my brackets came off (making eight that I’ve had come off during this process), and because it was a tooth that was on a powerchain, the powerchain rapidly started closing the “gap” left by the tooth that was off the wire. Net of this was that I had a tooth being pushed behind the other teeth, right up front. I called it my redneck tooth while I was at the NABC. I have a really grainy (cellphone) photo of it that I took for the purposes of sending to my dentist, but it’s not clear enough to be of use to y’all, I think. Point being, I had a really obvious tooth that was sitting higher than all the others and was behind the others, for about a week. As soon as we got back, I saw my dentist, and they got that tooth engaged on the wire again tout suite. It hurt like bloody hell, but 3 ibuprofen later, I was at home and out like a light on the couch, so I only really felt it for the time that I was driving home. By the next day, you couldn’t tell that anything had ever been wrong.

Net of this is that, because we need to give those teeth time to re-settle, we moved my impression appointment out by a week. Even that is going to be a “let’s see where we are appointment”, because the whole issue caused some of the other teeth to move out of place, and we need everything to be happily settled before we do the retainer impressions. I may end up wearing them another month beyond that, just to make sure everything is copasetic. (By the way, copasetic can be legitimately spelled 3 ways, and my spellchecker in Wordpress recognizes none of them. It’s like the spellchecker is protesting.)

The wild part is that I had speculated from day 1 that my “six month” braces were actually going to be seven and a half month braces, because my teeth were so messed up. The truth is though that, if this bracket issue hadn’t occurred and if it hadn’t occurred at such an inopportune time, my six month braces would have lasted almost precisely six months. That’s pretty amazing, when you consider where I started.

If you want to re-live the fun, click the “braces” tag on this post to get a listing of all posts on this topic.

Okay, now this is a reason to reproduce…maybe…

I want to have a baby, just so I can make it wear these shirts.

Garden Maze!

I’m still not entirely happy with the design, but check out my nifty Webkinz garden maze!

Apropos of Nothing…

Here’s some news that I’m posting for no reason whatsoever, just because I figure it might interest y’all:

Motorola announces plans to split into two companies

Edited to add on 28 Mar 2008: Venom filled “Motorola Insider” letter…read it with a grain of salt

News

I got two calls from my gyn office this morning. I just recently switched to a new office. I actually saw a Nurse Practitioner instead of a doctor, which is wicked cool to me, especially since my Aunt is a NP. She was extremely cool. I was also careful in selecting a new office. At the last place, it took me 3 appointments to find someone who didn’t want to either presume I wanted kids or disparage me for having casual (but safe) sex. Once I found her, I stuck with her, but with the move to Gurnee, working in LV, and doing so much travel for work, it’s gotten really hard to find a time that I can get down to Palatine to see her. So…I started a hunt for a new place, and I’m really happy with the one I found. I called several places and asked about their office policies on alternative lifestyles, whether I could do primary care screenings with them, too (saves me a visit somewhere else), and what kind of hours they offer for appointments. It wasn’t always fun making those pre-calls, but making them gave me really good information such that I felt much more comfortable at that first visit than I would have otherwise.

So, I talked to my NP about my history, my present, and my overall philosophies on stuff. As is usual for me, I requested a full blood test for STDs in additional to the usual tests. I also asked about Gardasil, the HPV vaccine. I’m outside of the age range for it, but I was curious if it could still be effective at my age and whether it was worth exploring for me. She said that it was, unfortunately, not likely to be effective, but that she could test me for HPV. HPV tests are something they typically do for women age 30 and up, and I’m not quite there yet, but I agreed that I wanted to be tested almost immediately. I also asked about getting a thyroid screening, since I have a relative who has recently been diagnosed with a thyroid disorder. She said that’d be no problem, so two cervical swabs and 3 vials of blood later, my info was off to the lab.

Today, I got all my test results back: negative on all the blood tests, pap came back normal, but the HPV came back positive. So, what does that mean? It means that I have something that 80% of all women have by age 50. It means I have a slightly higher risk of cervical cancer than I did before we knew this. It means that if I ever do show up with an abnormal pap, it warrants more attention than it would have before.

Oh and by the way, because I wasn’t clear on this until a few months ago, HPV does not equal genital warts. There are different strains of HPV, and from what I understand, that’s not the kind I have. (I have the cancer-related kind, not the wart-related kind.) HPV is also not permanent. In many people, their immune system kills it off pretty quickly. Thus, I’m getting tested again in six months to see if the HPV is gone or if it’s hanging around…and a repeat pap to make sure no abnormalities have come up.

Long story short, this is probably about the least big deal kind of thing that someone with my predilections could hope to run into. Nonetheless, if there’s anything that I’ve learned in the past 12 hours, it’s that lots of people are totally unaware of HPV and quite a few people are really misinformed about it…so I figured it’s worthwhile to blog about it and get the word out a bit. Basically, it’s more likely that you or your partner has it than that they don’t. Being able to test for it is a relatively new thing. Previously, the only way you found out was that you had a series of abnormal paps, and then you found out that you had pre-cancer if not full blown cancer. So, getting tested means you are more likely to catch a cancer instance earlier, which drastically reduces the impact.

PSA for the day: Get tested for HPV, and if you test positive or a friend does, don’t panic.

Home of Mardi Gras Punch

When you’re in college, you don’t have a ton of money to frequent steakhouses. Thus, it was a special treat for my friends and I, during our time at Tulane, to hop the streetcar down to Copeland’s on St. Charles. If we were feeling really spendy, we’d also indulge in a Mardi Gras Punch. With repeated tastings, we managed to reproduce the Mardi Gras Punch in our dorm. The recipe is below, in memory of a New Orleans legend.

Shake the following with ice and pour into a thoroughly chilled glass:

4 parts Tampico Tropical Punch (or mix Cherry, Orange, and Pineapple juices to taste…but I’d swear to my grave that Copeland’s must have just bought this stuff from Tampico in bulk because it is spot on)
1 part peach schnapps
2 parts spiced rum (reduce for a less potent variant)
1 part coconut rum
2 splashes triple sec

Dribble maraschino cherry juice around the inner rim to achieve a “sunset” effect. Garnish with cherry, pineapple, and orange.

Chuck Lorre Productions #198: Censored!

Well, despite Mr. Lorre’s prediction, I can’t find anything about his censored vanity card. Anyone in the readership know what’s up there?