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.