Fast Fashion / Slow Clothes

There's a part of me that loves the idea of shopping at thrift shops. No, wait. I actually do like shopping in thrift shops, at garage sales, at the consignment store, and hell, at the swap meet at the local dump. Your discard, my cheap treasure. But while I will look in those places for Christmas presents, clothes for my daughter, or wool sweaters to felt into projects, I don't have the patience to rummage through racks of clothes looking for garments for myself. It's just too daunting.

But I've discovered a thrift shop that I love. In a deliciously solipsistic twist, the charitable arm of Eileen Fisher started a "recycled clothing initiative" - in other words, a thrift shop that sells ONLY Eileen Fisher clothes.

GREEN EILEEN is reimagining the way we think about our clothes. Inspired by Eileen Fisher’s timeless designs and high quality fabrics, our recycled clothing initiative gives a second (or third!) life to your garment. By donating or buying a gently used Eileen Fisher garment from GREEN EILEEN, you are helping to revolutionize the future of how we buy and wear clothes.

I love this idea. I love that by limiting the merchandise to only Eileen Fisher stuff, they've curated the thrift shop into something inviting, gemütlich. Tops are along one wall, lined up like a rainbow. Skirts over there, dresses and pants elsewhere. I can walk in and know that I'll find something I want and even need.

* * * * * * * * * *

I just finished reading Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. The subtitle kind of says it all: it's indeed shocking to learn about the fast fashion industry. I'm a fairly low impact consumer - I don't buy a lot of clothes, because I'm just not that interested. I've learned that cheap shoes aren't worth the money, and I'd rather have a one well-cut top sewn out of quality fabric than five glitzy, shoddy* $10 shirts that pill up the first time they go through the wash. But still, the book made me sit up and think hard about the clothes I buy my child, and about the relationship between "own less and pay more". Later, as I was pulling laundry out of the dryer, I sighed at the broken stitches on the neckline of a barely worn Target dress, and at the holes in the toes of some nearly new socks**, and at the horrid pilliness of of a polyester shirt my kid got as a hand-me-down. But then, inspired by a chapter towards the end of Overdressed called Make, Alter, Mend, I reinforced a threadbare spot on a pair of my jeans, and artlessly repaired a hole in my husband's jeans. A few minutes work with iron-on twill tape and a sewing machine, and I bought at least some more months for two pairs of jeans. That's mending for you.

* * * * * * * * * *

Overdressed exposes the underbelly of fast fashion in a way similar to those writers like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser who've eviscerated fast factory food. What's the antidote to bad food? Eat real food, eat local, cook yourself. What's the antidote to cheap fashion? It's complicated, perhaps more so than the food issue. It'll mean paying more for clothes that are better made out of nicer fabric by people who are paid a living wage. Or, it means learning to make things yourself - if you have access to a sewing machine and a fabric store. You could start shopping in thrift shops, and altering the clothes you find to better suit you.  You might start buying the Danskos that are both comfortable and long lasting - the polar opposite of the "cute shoes" at Target that give you blisters on first wearing, and fall apart on third. I'd like to think that you could shop at Green Eileen; alas, that's not likely to be a scalable concept given that its parent, Eileen Fisher, is a fairly small clothing company - I have a hard time imagining that they could have more than a couple such stores (there's only one now). You could buy on eBay; it operates like a huge thrift shop. Try ThredUp - they'll pay you for your kids clothes and you can either take the cash, or buy "new" stuff from them. Or you could find a clothing swap: my town has done it for Halloween costumes, and prom dress swaps are fairly common. Jeans, sweaters, blouses - surely you have some that a friend wants, and vice versa. Have a cocktail party and swap clothes.

What it comes down to is this - the entire matrix of how we live our lives matters. The choices we make about beef (feed lot supermarket vs. grass fed butcher) and tomatoes (slave grown in Florida year round, or local farm grown and only available in August) aren't all that different from the choices we make about clothing. Live lightly on the land, and mend the holes in your blue jeans before they get so big that you have to throw them out.

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* "Shoddy" has a fascinating derivation - it turns out to be the name for a kind of cheap wool cloth made from rags and scrap fabric, recycled if you will. A noun once, an adjective now.

** Ironically, the socks with the hole in the toe are made by a company called "Darn Tough" - they claim to have a lifetime guarantee, so maybe I'll spring for some postage.

End Of An Era

First it was the costume shop. This time, the theatrical shoemaker in my office building went belly up.

He had shelves and shelves of shoe lasts, old wooden forms, most speckled with nail holes, many still sporting masking tape labels with the names of the actors/dancers for whom he'd made custom footwear.

Some were for flat shoes; others for high heels. A tiny doll-like pair was for a dwarf; a huge size 13D for an N. Wyman. The shop smelled like leather and ancient cigarette smoke, hot metal and dust.

Like the costume shop, he went out of business because no one wants custom made shoes for Broadway shows. Or no one wants to pay for custom made shoes. Or no one needs them?

And now, no longer necessary for their intended purpose, a pair of high-heeled feet - 7C, Dottie Frank - sit on a windowsill in my living room, a reminder of the days of handwork and small factories, of craft and things made one at a time.

Can't Go Home Again

I’m cleaning up my computer's “desktop”, filing all sorts of electronic detritus, the great morass of random, poorly named files, mostly pictures. And, as it's not possible to do otherwise, the task is filled with aimless archeology. It's not enough to move the pictures to a folder; one must ascertain just what these pictures are.

And my heart stopped when I found this. I didn't take it; the girl did. But it's my once-upon-a-time room, the room I grew up in, the bed, the fireplace. And she used a Hipstamatic filter so it looks all far away and underwater and old and, oh, memory.

It might as well have been taken 35 years ago.

How can it be that it's no longer there?

Manipulating The Dawn

Dear Director of Marketing and Public Relations,

I get a lot of pitches from PR companies and publishers. Most emails just get deleted – no, I really don’t want to interview a religious advisor on how to prepare for end-of-life, nor do I want any printable Pajanimals valentines, and I’m not interested in learning “how to cook like a deaf chef”. But sometimes I read the email, and I’m intrigued enough to respond.

Such was the case when you asked if I’d like to read a memoir about sailing around the world. It’s such a romantic notion, putting out to sea like that. And sailing – is there anything more exhilarating? I used to sail a lot as a young person – racing Blue Jays, cruising Long Island Sound on my grandfather’s yawl. Once we spent two weeks on that boat, with a compass and a one-way radio, and I’ll never forget sailing to Block Island through pea soup fog, somehow managing to hit the harbor entrance spot-on. If we hadn't, we’d probably have ended up in Portugal, at least, that’s how we like to tell the story.

So your book arrived, and because of various things going on in my life, I didn’t get to it for a while. When I finally sat down to read it, it turned out to be a slog. Oh, it’s not that it’s not interesting in parts – I mean, sailing around the world with islands and broken stays and a cat and drama is not uninteresting – but it’s dreadfully written.

You sent a follow-up email, asking if I’d “ever received a copy of How the Winds Laughed?”

And I answered:

I did, thanks. I'm finally reading it. I'm not likely to write about it because, frankly, I don't think it's very good. Interesting at times, yes, but rather clumsy and kind of confusing.

You wrote back and offered a few more books from your publishing house.

I wonder if you'd like to try reading a book by one of our seasoned writers? It's also a memoir, about end-of-life circumstances with her parents. It's tragic, funny, and transcendent and has been praised by all who've read it so far. It's called Entering the Blue Stone. I have attached the press kit here.

Apologies for never answering that email, but I was a bit put off after I figured out that Entering the Blue Stone had been written by your mother. I mean, it may well be a lovely book, but I think you should have mentioned up front that your mother had written it. In fact, though, you didn’t even name the author in the email – but when I saw in the press kit that you shared a last name, well, that sent me off on a search. It's not that it's a conflict of interest that you're representing your mother, but it seems to me you should be a little more transparent about the relationship.

By the way, because maybe I was unclear – by “not likely to write about it”, I meant that I probably wouldn’t take the time to write a blog post, because a blog post needs a hook and some passion, for me anyway, and I didn’t really have the energy to review a book that wasn’t worth reading. Also, remember that your initial email to me was addressed "Dear Esteemed Blogger", which leads me to think it's pretty clear that we were talking about my blog. But, because I like to warn my fellow readers, and because I compulsively track the books I read, I did post a few sentences on both Amazon and Goodreads:

After slogging through 40% of this, I decided to put it aside because life is too short to finish lousy books. Sure, it's interesting at times, and doesn't everyone kind of want to run off and circumnavigate the globe in a 28' wooden sailboat? Alas, it's rather clumsy and kind of confusing.

Sample sentence:

"Dawn rose slowly, pulling up her various window shades, tinting the lagoon gray". Please, who the hell is Dawn? Oh, Dawn's not a person, dawn is when the sun comes up. So why is the lagoon gray, and where are the rosy fingers?

The other day, you found the Amazon review I’d written, and you sent me a fairly unhappy email.

I'm writing because I was a bit stunned to see that you took the time to write a very negative review of How the Winds Laughed on amazon. I understand you didn't like the book--not every reader "gets" every book--and Addie Greene's primary audience may be readers with some knowledge and experience of sailing. But when a reviewer lets us know (as you did), that they don't want to review a book, we'd never dream that he or she would then post a derogatory review on amazon.

Fuze is a small press, running on a shoestring and dedicated to taking chances on new voices. For Addie Greene, Winds is her first book; she would be eager to hear constructive criticism/feedback. Amazon has complicated algorithms that greatly influence whether they totally bury a book or not, and negative reviews play a significant part in that decision. Given all this, I wonder if you would consider removing your review? Of course, if you had bought the book and felt dissatisfied enough to post such a review, I would never take issue with it.

First – I am a reader with some knowledge and experience of sailing. I’ve been on the water, and will be again. No, I’ve never sailed to the Marshall Islands. But I know how to fold a spinnaker, I know why a mast needs stays, I can tie a bowline, and I know what “batten down the hatches” means. Furthermore, I don’t think that a predisposition to the subject matter is what makes a person like a book. I’ve read about geology and long distance trucking and shad fishing with great relish, just because John McPhee can turn a sentence like no one, and makes obscure, idiosyncratic, unfamiliar topics come alive. The writing makes the book. Sadly, that wasn’t the case here.

Second – I didn’t say I didn’t want to review the book. I said I wasn’t likely to write about it, but that’s different. Further, a person is entitled to an opinion, not to mention a change of heart. As a publicist, you take risks every time you send your product out into the world. So do your authors. Someone will love your book, someone will hate it. Last week, a dance review in the New York Times began and ended thusly:

“N’a pas un gramme de charisme” is a worthy title for Claude Wampler’s new show: it translates, roughly, as “Hasn’t an ounce of charisma.” ...[snip]...Why does the title limit the show’s omissions to charisma alone? Everything about this piece is terrible: poorly conceived, poorly executed.

Do you think the publicist, or the choreographer, called the Times and asked them to take down the review? Um, no. It doesn't work that way. And, just so you know, the Times dance critic gets comp tickets. It's not as though buying your tickets lets you write a bad review and getting free tickets means you have to stay quiet.

Third – that you would have the temerity to ask me to remove the Amazon review is flabbergasting. Amazon’s been gamed. The review system is subject to manipulation by people who pay for five star reviews. Your request that I remove the review is just as manipulative as the person who pays $5 for a review.

What it boils down to is this:

If you send me a book, I may or may not write about it. I may or may not write something nice. That's the risk you take.

I think perhaps you’d better take me off of your list.

Best,

-Magpie

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Disclosure: The publisher sent me a free copy of How the Winds Laughed. My opinion is my own, and I wasn't compensated for anything I said, here or on Amazon or on Goodreads.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Darling, I got you a paperclip.

The design firm my office uses sends out whimsical Christmas cards and sporadic chapbooks, playful wordy designy things. This year's Christmas card was captivating, and I repurposed it into valentines. Mostly I made hodge-podge assemblages of stickers and rubber stamps and Happy Tape and ribbon. But one of them? Yes, it included a paperclip.

A whimsical Valentine's Day to you and yours.

Wordless Wednesday: Caged

The 46¢ Snow Day

After dithering about this morning, paralyzed with indecision about whether or not to trek into the office, I decided to stay home. At 8:15, when I made the call, it was snowing - gently but steadily. Now, shortly after lunch, it's coming down at a good clip. Clogs were fine when I put the girl on the bus; when I go pick her up at a friend's house later, I'll need boots.

I'm shuffling papers, checking email, baking bread, thinking about a website, doing laundry, contemplating benchmarking, and enjoying the quiet. It feels like a gift, this day - though I'm working, I'm not at work. Caramel brownies are on the agenda, and a fire in the fireplace wouldn't be wrong.

Besides, it was a great mail day. Today's pile included a valentine, a poem in an envelope made from a magazine picture of a pork roast, no bills, and an oversized solicitation from the goddamned NRDC containing a return envelope with a 46¢ stamp.

Remember, people, open all those envelopes from the NRDC, because they might just be sending you a free stamp.




(PS: If you need the back story on why I'm so irritated at the NRDC, read these posts.)

Stories Everywhere: Sorry, No Cats

#6 TRAIN - THURSDAY MORNING RUSH HOUR

INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

As I watch, you delicately, discreetly, tuck your scarf up under your nostrils. What terrible thing do you smell?

What do you do with that long pointed dirty thumbnail?

Hmm. Mustard colored tights. That takes chutzpah to wear, she added admiringly.

Dr. Zizmor parody spot on. No self-respecting cat would ever consider plastic surgery.



Yeah, I did just take a picture of a subway ad. You got a problem with that?

Wow, ugly hat.

You, with the inside out tote bag slung over your shoulder? I recognize the squiggles and can decipher the backwards lettering; it's an Eden Fantasys bag, like the ones they were handing out at BlogHer. I love that you have it inside out, but I'm onto you.

Why do we make silly faces at other people's babies? (Yes, guilty as charged.)

EXIT - 22nd AND PARK

This is my message to you-oo-oo...

"Don't worry about a thing,
'cause every little thing gonna be all right..."

You know that song, right? You're probably bopping your head around, singing it to yourself right this very minute. And if you're prone to such things, you may have just acquired an ear worm. I'm sorry, but...

"Don't worry about a thing,
'cause every little thing gonna be all right..."

Here's a question, though: do you know the name of the song? The actual name of the song?

Three Little Birds.

* * * * * * * * * * *

A while ago, a publicist asked if I wanted a review copy of a book, by Bob Marley's daughter Cedella, who turned Three Little Birds into a children's book called "Every Little Thing".

It's cute, but here's its problem. While some song lyrics work as poetry if you dissociate them from their music, that's not the case here. The book wants to be a read-aloud, for a pre-schooler or early elementary-aged child. And for reading aloud, the poetry sucks. It would have been << putting on editor's hat and raising red pencil >> far better to have turned the song into prose. Like I said, it's cute, and the illustrations are exuberantly fun, but it's far too awkward to read aloud.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Everything will be alright, as long as you worry about prose, prosody, and poetry. Not to mention grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Delivery matters, even in a book meant for kids.

Guilt / Regret / Delight

I have to get over feeling guilty about:

• cucumbers that have gone bad in the fridge
• review copies of books that are so bad I can't finish them, much less write about them
• that face-up penny I didn't pick up on Thursday because both hands were full and my bag was hanging off of my elbow

I have to get over my regret at:

• having forgotten to write my name in Sharpie inside the closet of my room at my mother's house
• failing to take the "baby girl" bassinet card when we went home from the hospital more than nine years ago
• not seeing Peter and The Starcatcher on Broadway

I am, however, delighted about:

• Caitlyn Moran's How to Be a Woman
• the tweet of Moran's I found the other day (and really, you must click that link, and the link in the tweet)
• the chickpea/farro/leek salad I made for dinner last night
• just how wonderful Moonrise Kingdom is

You? Name something that delights you.

As Seen On TV

Let's not bury the lede, shall we? If it says "As Seen On TV" on the box, run screaming in the other direction.

Case in point: a cake pop pan. The box says "fun & easy!" and shows a tidy person's disembodied hand pouring cake batter into all the little holes. Pouring, with a measuring cup, meaning that the batter is thin and pourable.

Um, not as such.

I need to digress here. The instructions called for "one standard box of cake mix according to directions". Sorry, I don't do cake mix. Come on, cake isn't hard. It's just mixing. Back to the instructions; they included this note:

For best baking results: Use an extra egg, substitute milk for water and use half as much as the recipe calls for. Also add a pudding mix that matches your cake choice.

That little note kind of subverts the "one standard box of cake mix according to directions". And shall we mention the lack of clarity in the "use half as much" of what? Water, milk, cake mix?

After sputtering around the kitchen fuming about cake mix and the decline of Western civilization as we know it, I settled on a staggeringly easy cake recipe from the 1953 edition of The Joy of Cooking. It's the kind of recipe that gives cake mix a bad name, because all you do is dump flour, sugar, butter, eggs, milk, salt, baking powder, cocoa powder and vanilla in the mixer and beat it up for a while. It already called for two eggs, so I didn't add any, and I didn't add any pudding mix either, thank you very much. The batter was, um, not thin enough to pour neatly into all those little divots. No, I resorted to spatula smearing it into the holes.

We clamped the top on the pan and stuck it in the oven. Shortly thereafter, the girl peered through the oven window and discovered that we had many little cake volcanos - cake oozing out of all the top holes. I grumbled some more.

When the pan was out and cool enough to handle, removing the top revealed lacy thin cookies veneering the entire surface of the pan.

Happily, the little balls of cake popped right out of their divots, though many were belted at their equators. Miracles of non-stick technology, with a judicious application of Baker's Joy.

The next step was to coat them in "candy coating". Is this a thing? Oh, there was another note:

To make a simple candy coating, follow melting instructions on the back of semi sweet chocolate chip bag. Add a tablespoon of vegetable oil if coating is too thick after microwaving.

Right. I'm going to adulterate some perfectly good chocolate with vegetable oil? I don't think so. (And that tablespoon of oil? What volume of chips was it supposed to adulterate? Oh for comprehensive articulate instructions.) We forged on, dipping the cake balls into our melted chocolate. The chocolate was indeed too thick, and the sticks were too flimsy, and so we did not achieve anything like enrobement. No, our balls were dipped on the bottom and perhaps one side, and sprinkles were applied haphazardly at best.

Here's what I have to say: run very very far from the cake pop pan. And please, don't even consider buying one of the single purpose electric appliances that makes cake balls. Just make a cake. A nice plain cake, like the Hurry Up cake from the 1953 Joy of Cooking. It's easy. Your kitchen won't look like an army of sticky chocolate covered toddlers has marched through, and your blood pressure will remain within normal limits.

The worst of it? The nine year old doesn't even want to eat them.

OMFG

I have kind of lost my blogging mojo. Oh, there are lots of posts in draft, and lots of ideas rattling around in my skull, but the actual sitting down and applying quill pen to parchment? That's just not happening.

Whatev. I'll be here when I'm here.

But lest you think I'm not still paying attention to charitable giving, guess what I got in yesterday's mail? You got it! A direct mail piece from the NRDC! Yes, the second one this year! And we're only halfway through January!

Why yes, I do like poking things with sticks.

2012: A Year In Books

Because I'm a tiny bit OCD about books, I like using Goodreads to keep track of what I read. (I know. Shut up. It isn't like anyone's expecting me to hand in my book log or anything.)

In 2011, I read 60 books; in 2012, only 58. But! I read fewer books aloud to the girl in 2012 - a consequence of her getting older, and more inclined to read herself to bed - which means that I read more books on my own account. I also read more ebooks, a sign of the times that I'm not sure I love. For lots of reasons, I prefer paper.

	2011	2012
Total Books Read	60	58
Fiction	27	34
Non-Fiction	33	24
Read Aloud to the Child	15	6
Total Grown-Up Books	45	52
ebooks	4	7
library books	5	5
unfinished	1	2

I love looking over the list, and making little connections. Two books were about unrelated Pettigrews: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Two were memoirs by bloggers: Emily Rosenbaum and Jenny Lawson. Three were by Suzanne Collins (yes, I devoured the Hunger Games trilogy while out sick last spring), two were by Roald Dahl (since we love reading aloud his darkly comic tales) and two were by Curtis Sittenfeld (because I scored hardcovers of Prep and American Wife at the book swap at the farmer's market - though not on the same day).

I added three terrific cookbooks to the kitchen library - Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal, Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen, and Diana Henry's Salt Sugar Smoke - what, you don't read cookbooks from cover to cover, under the covers? A few older books were transfixing: Edna Ferber's So Big (which I read because of a book club at the library), Mary Dutton's Thorpe (a book I found on a blog post a long time ago), and Wilkie Collins' No Name (a big complicated Victorian thriller/novel which you can get as a free ebook). And the one hair-raising book I might want to read all over again is Gone Girl -just because it's so richly packed with tiny important details. I'm also anxiously awaiting volume three of Hilary Mantel's Henry VIII tales, after reading Bring Up The Bodies this year, and Wolf Hall in 2011.

What did you read in 2012? What are you looking forward to? And what's on your nightstand right now?

One Out Of Four

You know how in The Polar Express Santa picks a kid off the train to receive the first gift of Christmas?

Today, I got the first solicitation of 2013! And guess who it was from? Give me an N, give me an R...that's right - my number one bad charity of 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council. Alas, there was no live stamp on the return envelope - though I guess that's progress of a sort.

* * * * * * * *

After my Cranky Philanthropist post last week, I made sure to "amplify" it by posting it on Twitter, four separate times, calling out each of the bad charities and using their Twitter handles so that they'd see the tweets. Did anyone respond? One charity did - Riverkeeper.

Riverkeeper's Director of Development followed up with an email, and after a back and forth, we made up. She sent me a copy of last year's thank you note - which I assume had been lost by the post office - and I told her they could keep us on the list if they promised only one solicitation a year (and no newsletters).

So, Riverkeeper's back on the good charity list.

* * * * * * * *

Believe me, I'm not saving all of the charitable mail this year. But I am still paying attention.

A Near Perfect Side Dish

A close reading of the New York Times magazine a couple of weeks ago resulted in the perfect side dish for our Christmas dinner. In fact, it might be the perfect side dish for nearly any roast meat meal, in that it seems like a starch, but it's really mostly vegetables. I'd heard of soubise, but because I'm not Julie Powell and I haven't cooked absolutely everything in Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, I had never tried it. Big mistake. We will have to make up for lost time by putting on the menu several times a year.

Essentially, it's cooked onions thickened with a bit of rice. Or, a reverse risotto - a little rice with a lot of seasoning. And it's really really good, not to mention easy, and forgiving. You could probably even leave the cheese out if you felt that was necessary. What's not to like?

---

Soubise
Adapted from Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"

1/2 cup rice, (arborio or carnaroli)
4 quarts water
1 1/2 T. salt (to salt the water)
4 T. butter (one-half stick)
2 pounds yellow onions
1/8 t. pepper (a few good grinds)
1/2 t. salt
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup grated Gruyère cheese (or swiss)
2 T. softened butter
1 T. minced parsley.

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and put 4 quarts of water on to boil.

2. Meanwhile peel your onions, cut them in half the long way, and slice thinly (into half rings).

3. Heat the 4 T. of butter in a three or four quart flameproof lidded casserole. When the butter is melted and foaming, stir in the onions.

4. Add the 1 1/2 T. salt to your vigorously boiling water, pour in the rice and boil for exactly five minutes. Drain immediately.

5. Stir the drained rice into the butter-coated onions, add the 1/2 teaspoon salt and the pepper. Cover and cook in the oven for one hour, stirring occasionally if you must. The rice and onions should become very tender and will smell heavenly. Taste and re-season if necessary. (Pause here if you're making a big meal and have lots of other things to cook - the onions will hold nicely. Reheat before the finishing additions.)

6. Just before serving, stir in the cream and cheese and then the softened butter. Taste again for seasonings and turn into a (hot covered vegetable) dish. Serve with sprinkled parsley.

Portrait of the artist ...

Yes, I got a new camera for Christmas. Yes, I got a new lens for my birthday. Yes, the tree is coming down this weekend, but I did have rather a lot of fun taking pictures of my enormous - and not so - balls.

The Cranky Philanthropist

A year ago, after sending out a raft of little charitable contributions at the end of 2011, each with its own little admonition, please do not solicit more than once a year, please do not sell or rent my name, I decided to conduct a small experiment. For the whole of 2012, I kept every piece of mail that came in asking for money - snail mail, not email. By the middle of December, it amounted to a goodly boxful. I sorted it, tallied it, and - I'm sorry to report - was forced to add a few charities to the naughty list.

Most organizations are either sophisticated enough to flag their database in such a way that they did not, in fact, send out multiple solicitations. Others are so unsophisticated that I never get, nor expect to get, more than one or two a year - the local volunteer fire department comes to mind.

After the great sorting, we sat down to discuss the various solicitations, en famille. Some were rejected:

• Boys & Girls Club: "I don't swim there anymore."
• Care: Seven solicitations in one calendar year is too many, especially since we've never given to you.
• The local Police Benevolent Association: "They can always ask the Girl Scouts to fundraise for them." (Um, huh? Don't ask me, I'm just reporting what the nine year old said.)

Some were newly added to the list:

• American Museum of Fly Fishing: "We have to do that because of Daddy", who does like fly fishing but doesn't get to do it much at all.
• Fair Girls: They work to prevent the exploitation of girls worldwide and Nick Kristof told me about them.
• EarthJustice: mostly because I liked their tag line about the earth needing a good lawyer (and Charity Navigator gave them 4 stars).
• Dr. Hawa Abdi (via Vital Voices): Dr. Abdi runs a hospital, school and refugee camp in Somalia, and and Nick Kristof told me about her too.

In the end, we sent contributions to a mixed bag of local organizations (the afore-mentioned fire department, the local historical society, the day care center the girl attended) and bigger ones (Planned Parenthood, Unicef, International Rescue Committee), domestic and international.

And, because I am a crank, I sent notes - without contributions - to four organizations that we've supported in the past, because they really irritated me.

• The NRDC sent us ten pieces of mail in 11 and a half months. Six of them included a return envelope with a live stamp - 45 cents right there in each solicitation! I used one of those envelopes to ask them to take me off their list, and had no compunctions about readdressing the remaining five to use to give to small charities who didn't waste their money giving me a stamp.
• Doctors without Borders sent us six pieces of mail, and they get extra demerits because not one of their envelopes included a return address, which is a sneaky way of getting someone to open your envelope in the first place.
• Partners In Health sent us five pieces of mail, three too many. (Even though I asked for only one solicitation a year, two doesn't offend my sensibilities hugely because, well, I'm not that rigid, and anyway, the lists do get prepped in advance.)
• Riverkeeper sent us four pieces of mail - too much mail, compounded by the fatal error of not having thanked us for last year's gift.

When I ask that a charity only solicit us once a year, I mean it. I don't want paper and stamps and time wasted on asking me for money; I want the money spent on the cause that I'm supporting. It's simple, really. It's all about stewardship.

You can, though, be sure that I'll keep opening the envelopes from the NRDC. I mean, you can always use a nice first class stamp to pay some bill or another, right?

Two times Two times Thirteen

A deck of cards (without jokers).

The white keys on an 88 key piano.

Weeks in a year, rounded off to the nearest week.

And me.

I'm divisible by 13 (and 2 and 2), and sometimes added into metal alloys.

I'm 52 today, and as I always do, I sent off a check in the amount of my age, to the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. It's my little way of marking my birthday.

Great Mysteries of Blogdom

Sometimes - but not very often - I look at my blog stats, the ones that Blogger provides. You can't drill too deeply (or I don't know how), and sometimes the results are just weird and mysterious.

Here are the top 10 search keywords, as of the other day:

• bruce the shark
• monkey bread
• cats in hats
• mix and match ideas for school
• need christmas certificates
• reading log
• azalea
• boredom
• underpants enema
• apple clafouti julia child

At the same time, the post with the top number of hits was one titled IVF Shoes - about the shoes you buy as a treat for yourself while you're in the middle of your in vitro ferilization cycle. How those two things - those keywords and that top grossing post - are related is a mystery to me.

Also, "underpants enema"? WHY?

Instead Of An Apple

I confess to a great distaste for giving gift cards or money to people at Christmas time. In fact, I'm not really a fan of tipping in general. I do it, because one must, I tip in restaurants and taxi cabs, and I mailed a Christmas check to the newspaper delivery person who I've never laid eyes on, and certain young people of my acquaintance are getting Amex cards, but I've never felt inclined to give a cash gift to my child's school teacher - it's too much like a tip, and Amy Vanderbilt says you don't tip professionals. I know, it's just me, and you may well have lots of arguments as to why the teacher needs the money, and how it's likely that that money will be spent back into the classroom. That said, I very much like giving little gifts at Christmas to people who are important to me and to us, and my kid's teacher certainly falls into that category.

Remembering that on open school night my daughter's teacher had confessed to an Amazon habit to feed her classroom library, and knowing that she had a Scholastic wish list, I decided that a book would be the right gift. I ended up getting a copy of The Doll People, a book my daughter had recently read and loved, and which I knew (from her) not to be on the classroom shelves.



To gussy up the gift, I printed a set of bookplates using art work from Helen Dardik's Orange You Lucky blog. I cut and pasted the art (free to use as long as it's credited back to Helen, thank you Helen!) into a Word template for Avery 5163 labels, figured out how to type on top of the image (so they could be personalized), printed them out, and whacked them a bit with the paper cutter. A spare label (from the outtakes) went into the book; ten more bookplates were tucked into the card. I was really pleased with the end result.

Happy Christmas to a super wonderful teacher!