The Mandelbear's Musings

Today I began the annual ritual called "Sorting the Charities". It's a real pain for me to keep track of charity contributions -- many of them send a request every month! That's a lot of checkbook to check back through, and they're obviously hoping I'll miss one. (We'll ignore the fact that maybe if I paid in January, they wouldn't keep bugging me all year.)

Anyway, my technique for coping with this deluge of begging letters is simply to toss them onto a big pile and sort through them in late December, in time to write a big batch of checks during the holiday season, when I'm feeling generous.

Eventually, of course, I have to decant the pile into a box before it reaches critical mass and explodes onto the office floor. Last year it took two boxes. This year it took three.

Rather than take over a large chunk of the living room for a folding table, as I did last year, I went out to the garage and found a 2'x4' chunk of half-inch oak plywood, and set it onto a corner of the office counter weighted down with the UPS that I took out of service last night and turned off while it's waiting for a new battery. It's the corner normally occupied by the guest computer, but nobody is likely to be using it until Saturday at the earliest.

I have gotten through the oldest box, and the plywood is currently covered with some 30-odd piles of envelopes. There are a few charities that don't bother putting a logo or a return address on their envelopes -- those go straight into the recycling bag, as do the ones I know I'm not going to support this year, but that somehow slipped past me on the initial mail sort. Folks, if you want my money, you'll make it easy for me to tell who you are.

I think what I'm going to do next is go through the last box and the small pile that's accumulated in the last few weeks. Then I can give the middle box a cursory run-through in case I missed anything.

Maybe next year I'll make a file folder for every charity, keep careful track, and pay a few every month. It would make a lot of sense. Bets, anyone?

10:52pm Update: done sorting. Now I just have to find the most appropriate (not always the most recent) item to pay in each stack, possibly decide what else to drop, and write checks. Tomorrow. I also have to go through my other piles of procrastinated mail and see what needs urgent attention; fortunately these are much smaller.

Party at the Starport today. That means that there's a lot to do, but very little of it will involve writing checks, printing CDs, or writing CGI scripts to take preorders. Urk!

I went to bed early -- 10pm -- and woke up feeling considerably better. I could breathe, and there didn't seem to be anything stuck in my throat. I'm still coughing a little but it's not as bad as yesterday. Whether I make it through the day is an open question.

I am not a particularly religious person. Given a choice between a charity associated with a church with which I have no association whatever, and a non-secular one performing the same function, I'll take the non-secular one every time.

Enclosing a necklace with a crucifix attached is not going to improve your chances. Quite the contrary -- it makes me wonder what else you might be planning to waste my money on.

I'm a horrible procrastinator; for the last couple of years I've mostly "handled" charitable contributions by letting the begging letters pile up until the end of the year, then paying them all at once, usually at the last possible moment. (There's actually some logic to this -- I get paid on the last work day of the month, so I have two paychecks to draw on. Also, this year there are some tax advantages to payments made between August and the end of the year, thanks to hurricane Katrina.)

Nevertheless, I may have to reconsider for next year -- 31 contributions so far, plus a couple I want to discuss with the flower_cat in the morning, ranging from $17 to $150. That doesn't count a couple of ongoing "just charge my credit card every so often" items. It's not so much the total amount as the time it takes to sort a whole file box of envelopes, cull the duplicates, decide which to support (about 2/3 or more of the total, I think), write the checks, lick the damned envelopes, and apply the stamps and return address stickers.

By the way, if you design mailings for a charity, please make sure that your reply envelope is big enough for a standard check, and for your reply form as well. And if you call somebody and they say they'll give you a contribution, but only if you don't call them again, take them off your call list! Just a suggestion.