Recently in charity Category

So, I had the most interesting of weeks, in which a number of noteworthy things happened:

1. David visited from Yale, straight off his finals. He and his friend Ethan finished their last exam and said "Let's go see pretty boys in La Cage!" and so they did, and arrived at my house at midnight positively gobsmacked over a pretty, pretty chorus boy whose muscular feats I was instantly shown on Jean Claude (David's new Mac powerbook). They were drunk on him, and I found it all very funny, especially since I had spent the previous hour in the dullest of ways, stamping and preparing about 200 envelopes with stickers for Get a Clue, and the night before that having a shouting match with my printer over the adorable little labels I made for said envelopes.

So, these two who had not slept for days had also just seen a show and made it, somehow, over the bridge to my house, and then crashed. Ethan left early while David slumbered and I went to work. I came home at lunch and there was David, lounging around like he was my kept wife. We made omelets and watched as Mike and Lisa struggled in with our new Christmas tree. Later we watched The Apprentice at Mom's (thank GOD fembot Jen didn't win), and came back laden with boxes of my Christmas in the City village, my ceramic, beautiful set that I've been collecting since I'm 10 years old. Mike had put out some of his Dickens village, and there was a whole space on the radiator left, so I brought over Radio City, the Capitol, the City Globe, the Times building, Hollydales, and a few more (pics soon). The front room of my house now looks warm and happy and festive, and I spend nights quite content in comfy clothes just watching the tree twinkle. David and I watched The West Wing and then crashed.

2. After dropping David at the ferry the next morning, I went back to my office (though it was my day off) and finally finished my teens-playing-poker story, which should have run by now but hasn't because I couldn't find a set of kids who would let me watch them play. I did finally find a set of kids, the previous night; David and I stopped there before going to my Mom's, and watched these 14-to-22-year-olds play like pros. The 16 year old has won $1,500. The 14 year old? $400. The 20-and21-year-olds are in AC every weekend, and prepping for a trip to Vegas. They throw chips like they belong in Ocean's Eleven. It was fascinating and also upsetting, because it was so good that I knew that Friday would be spent ripping my previously-finished story to shreds and starting anew. Which is what I did. For five hours.

3. Heidi D, who posts as Puffin on TLC, came over, and thank goodness, as I needed a NYC-based person who could help me package all these stickers. She sent me an email offering help, and I picked her up at the ferry. We are both lefthanded workhorses, I discovered, and in six hours had carefully labeled, stamped, stickered, taped and sent more than 350 orders (about 600 stickers). I've still got a few to do, but man, it was so nice to sit there with movies playing in the background, with a very nice and normal HP fan, chattering away as we worked like well-oiled envelope stuffers. I was shocked when we got through all the Pay Pal orders up to the 15th. My life looks incredibly rosier with that much off my plate.

4. I came back from dropping Heidi off at the ferry and settled in on my couch, lights off, Christmas tree's blue lights twinkling, the Christmas village sparkling, me in sweats and comfy beyond belief, to check email and enjoy. Well. There was this rustling sound. I turned my head. BOOM. The Christmas tree FELL. Scared the living crap out of me. Two inches to my right, it had fallen flat on its side, glass ornaments shattering, basically exploding glass all over the living room. I called Mike in shock, and he came home, and we spent the next hour picking shards up from corners and sweeping the hardwood floors, looking for Rudolph's lost paw and Santa's lost shoe.

5. I slept twelve hours that night, mostly because my phone, after waking Mike up with its YouHaveVoiceMail beeps, had died and I had never heard it once. So I slept, mercifully, and fully, and woke at 2:30 so refreshed I keep calling it the best night of my life.

And that is what passes for interesting in my life these days. This week: Last minute Christmas shopping with a friend, acting all New Yawk while we sip cappuccino and show each other what's in our bags. Ahh. :) Oh, and more on London coming too, but I wanted to take a break.

It’s 6:45 a.m. and my house is quiet. Kirky told me to get some sleep, and the ache behind my eyeballs agrees. But I’m wired. We just had eight people working like house elves - yes Hermione, I mean it – on the remainder of the Leaky T-shirts. Packing, labeling, shipping, taping, recording, sorting, folding, cramming, loading, lifting, driving. And now it’s done, and my friends, who didn’t have to do a damn thing to convince me, have again proven how amazing they are.

We expected to sell around 200 or so shirts for this drive – we ended up selling 800.

Doing so through some easy manufacturing online place like CafePress would have cut the profit down to $1 or maybe even less a T-shirt, for the same price, which is ridiculous. We can’t donate a significant amount of money to charity like that. So we decided to do it all ourselves, and in so doing gained $6 per shirt in base costs alone – or so we thought.

Our shirt manufacturer shaved an extra dollar off the price of each shirt, tax, screening fees and any extra allowance for the many XL, XXL, and XXXL shirts we ordered.

That’s $1200 in cost. That’s a $1200 donation.

Then the lovely donors just thought they’d throw in an extra fifty cents here, dollar there, round out their $13.50 order to $20, tack on an extra $50. Those penny tosses worked out to over $1100. in added donation.

We didn’t account for PayPal fees, so we were docked a bit – but shipping worked out to less than we had originally been quoted. At $.50 less for half the shirts, and a whole $2.00 less for some others, it adds up to at least an extra $500 in donations – or at least in making up what greedy PayPal took.

And handling, well that wasn’t free, but it didn’t cost anything. We worked our butts off tonight, and Meg (and I, but to a lesser extent) has been busting her bum for weeks. And every time I tore off a label or someone struggled with packing tape, or we complained that a mistake had been made and we had to check 200 orders, I thought, well, there’s a dollar saved in fees, that’s one more book for a kid who needs it. And I picked up the next package. As I’m sure my friends did.

I’ve lost count, I have no idea how much we’re going to end up donating to Book Aid. It’ll be up on leaky soon.

That my friends would come out for a weekend and spend the entire night slaving over packing materials instead of sleeping, and do it cheerfully and swiftly, is just unbelievable.

So unbelievably tired – I am so tired – I’m going to bed. Right now.

If you don't already know about this, please GO HERE and tell EVERYONE you know about it. It's important, it's working, it's going to make history. Spread the word - "GET A CLUE"!