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December 20, 2007
Food for Thought...
I was alerted to this news item today. A New York hotel offering a thousand dollar bagel complete with white truffle cream cheese, goji berry infused Riesling jelly and golden leaves. (Hat tip to R.M.)
Profits from the luxury bagel benefit culinary arts students in order to inspire them to think outside the box. I would like to honor his sentiment with a little thinking of my own, what else could be done with that same $1,000.00? I did some quick research and discovered there is quite a lot of good that could be accomplished for far less. Lets see how well we can spend it.
I think it's only fair we begin our spending spree in the shadow of the New York hotel which offers the $1,000.00 bagel. From World Vision:
One in three children in New York City lives in poverty, making it the most impoverished rich city in the nation. Every day these children face the realities of drugs, crime, social injustice, and poor education. Your gift can provide practical help through resources like brand-new clothing, diapers, blankets, household and personal care items, and even toys for Christmas — often the only gift a child will receive.
For $150.00 we can provide $1950.00 worth of necessities for these children
Another $75.00 will provide a goat for a family in countries such as Haiti or Malawi
Not into the goat thing? How about a pig for $195.00? Perhaps the pig will be useful in sniffing out another crop of the expensive truffles, providing the family with yet another source of income.
Everyone needs water, for $50.00 we can provide a school with enough water treatment tablets to provide safe drinking water for up to 250 children for an entire year.
It's a little outside our budget, but with the help of four other bagel loving friends, we could provide a traditional well for an entire community, for $5390.00. To stay inside our budget, lets donate $75.00 as a share of the traditional well.
On over to the World Food Programme site for more shopping:
For $24.00 we can feed and educate a young girl for 6 months, lets double it and provide her with an entire year for $48.00. (At this rate we could see her through 12 years of schooling for $576.00. Maybe she will be the one to discover a cure for cancer, now THAT would be thinking outside the box.)
Just $36.00 would provide food, education and health sanitiation for a child for one year.
For $230.00 we could supply multiple-micronutrient powder for 50 children for one year.
We still have $141.00 left to spend. Isn't this fun? How would you spend the rest of the money? Would you provide nutrition to a pregnant or lactating woman for a year, wrap someone in a warm blanket or help them with clothing and shoes? Would you do something entirely different with a TisBest charity gift card? Which charities would you like to include?
Posted by Anna at 10:16 PM | Comments (2)
What's in a Name?
The whole debate circling around the "Christ" in "Christmas" grates on my nerves. I don't have a problem with people who wish to celebrate religious tradition on December 25th, or any other day of the year. But, the reason Christ is in Christmas at all, is because Christians put him there when they hijacked the seasonal celebration from the pagans in order to convert them to Christianity. Perhaps those who wish to return to a more "traditional" Christmas should send Saturnalia, Natalis Sol Invicti, or Yule cards.
I think the origin of winter celebrations was probably some prehistoric mother suffering from "cave fever" (the precursor to "cabin fever"), who decided to entertain her offspring with an invisible visitor who would leave them gifts, but only if they were very well behaved. Once the neighbors got wind of the effectiveness of her bribery, they tried it on their own offspring, and then gathered around a dinner of roast mastadon to talk about it. As years went by, the celebration escalated with each family trying to out-do the others in the extravagance of their celebration until we arrive at 2007.
Celebrate whatever you wish, the season is the reason.
Posted by Anna at 2:06 PM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2007
Where did this year go, and other random musings...
Tonight marks the first night of my Christmas vacation, for the next two weeks I will be doing as much "nothing" as possible. I eased into it by sitting around on the couch most of the day. I did get up long enough to retrieve the box UPS brought, and tell the carrier the two yappy little dogs nearly attached to his unprotected calves were not mine. I did not tell him one of them is known to bite, and has asked Santa to put a UPS guy in his stocking. I also abated the post-gift-wrapping chaos, now I can walk across my floor without stepping on scissors, empty tape dispensers (if you ask my opinion, 3M is the company who makes the biggest haul out of Christmas) or rolls of wrapping paper. Then I took a nap.
I find it disturbing to realize with nearly a week left before Christmas, I am burned out on Christmas music. Not all Christmas music, but all the bad remakes. How many different ways can there be to sing "Winter Wonderland", "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" or "Let it Snow"? I realized this yesterday while sitting in my car listening to "Rudolph" being sung with the voice of Santa in a fake German accent. ("Rudolph with your nose so bright, won't you guide mein sleigh tonight" WTF?) The saddest part is my radio station refuses to play normal music for the last two weeks before Christmas, to help me get into a holiday spirit. If I sign an affadavit, swearing I am in the holiday spirit and vowing to remain there until at least 9:00 am on December 25th, could we please have some regular songs? The only thing worse than the bad remakes is the commercials. If you are making a Christmas commercial, please, don't sing your message to the tune of any Christmas song, and please, please, please, don't ask your kids to sing it either. Kenny G is the exception, I could listen to his "Miracles" album all year round.
I don't know if I have been good or bad this year, I'm sure there are a number of opinions on that matter, but I do know Santa is bringing me this book this year. I know because I wrapped it myself.
Posted by Anna at 7:35 PM | Comments (3)
December 1, 2007
An IKEA weekend.....
Last week Dave & Jen took my IKEA virginity. Sure, I'd looked at their catalogs and browsed their site on the internet, but I'd never actually experienced IKEA. I bought this dresser (in the black-brown finish) and this chandelier for my princess bedroom. Dave loaded them into my little hyundai, and to everyone's amazement, it all fit!
The next morning I set out for home, or thought I was setting out for home, one of my tires was completely flat. Mark (of Mark & Meryl fame) unloaded the dresser, extracted my spare, changed the tire, reloaded the dresser and rode around with me to get the tire fixed. An hour later I was back in business, and had a mostly uneventful drive home (with the spare tire sitting on top of the 176 pound boxes of dresser just in case).
Last night I carried everything in, and assembled the dresser. It really looks like the one in the store, nothing is crooked and all the drawers slide in and out smoothly. Although my knees are sporting some near-bruises from crawling around on the hardwood floor for three and a half hours, and there was one small hand injury involving a hammer (it wasn't my thumb, that's all I'm saying). This morning I installed the chandelier, turned the breaker on and it worked too! I think this could be real love.... *sigh*
Posted by Anna at 4:03 PM | Comments (0)
Alternatives to watching paint dry....
I'm in the process of installing this light fixture in the princess bedroom. The old fixture was the ugliest ceiling fan ever made, and some painting was required to make up the difference. While waiting for the paint to dry, I spent my time expanding my vocabulary and donated 2100 grains of rice to feed the world's hungry on freerice.com. You can help too.
After playing awhile, I wandered around their site a little more, and was ashamed to find of the 21 countries pledged to donate 0.7% of national income to aid the world's hungry, US is second to last, having donated only 17 cents per $100.00 of income. You can see the whole list here.
Posted by Anna at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)