In the Spirit of the Season

How ironic that my most recent post was about having more time than money. Long story short, I quickly got a new job, and in addition to learning the ropes at the new gig, my volunteer work with HiveBio has been taking up a lot of my mental energy. And then it was the holidays.

This year, my family decided to draw names for gift giving, which reduced the number of adults we needed to get gifts for tremendously. This, all by itself, is awesome, since I didn't have shopping anxiety to contend with. But even better, most of my family members requested donations for Christmas. How cool is that?  So, I donated to the Red Cross for my grandmother, and Northwest Harvest for my mother-in-law. I drew my brother's name, and donated to Child's Play (an organization that provides toys and video games to kids in hospitals). He donated to Northwest Harvest AND Friends of Youth. My sister-in-law also donated to Northwest Harvest on behalf of my mom. By my estimate, about $400 were gifted to charity for the holidays.

And while I haven't been blogging, the thermometer keeps inching it's way up. We surpassed the 60% mark, and are approaching $20,000!

Salad Bars 2 Schools in Concrete

So here is a cool thing that my mother-in-law alerted me to. A group called Salad Bars 2 Schools provides grants for schools to upgrade their cafeteria equipment to include a salad bar. The grants are crowd funded, so you can support a school salad bar in your own neighborhood (or my mother-in-law's neighborhood).

Brief platitudes: Nutrition matters, especially during childhood and adolescence. Plenty of evidence connects consumption of vegetables with lower levels of obesity, and the related health and performance problems that come with it. Want kids to be successful at school? Help them get vegetables at school.  You can learn more here.

Go here, look for Concrete School District and make it happen.

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Other updates, Project Save the World needs to take a brief back seat to my latest endeavor: Find a Job! I'll be a free agent come November, but I'm hoping to find something new before then. I apologize if updates get fewer and farther between for a while, but I will continue to update the thermometer. I might need more help from guest bloggers and volunteers/donors in the meantime. Please let me know if you can help! We're so close to the halfway mark!

Dinner to the Shelter

Just another note that my Mom and I made dinner for the Landing, the Friends of Youth Emergency Shelter. The calendar of people taking dinner has a lot more gaps this month; I dropped off a gift card for groceries, so they can pick up dinner for another night.

The Boring Part

My desk is positively littered with very sweet notes providing receipts for charitable giving. This is cool. In years past, I would have recycled these.  But I think there is a good chance I might make a charitable level of giving this year that warrants a tax deduction.  So I'll be keeping these.  Hopefully not all on my desk.