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Penultimate Day Off
The new semester and work starts on Monday, so I have been running errands and clearing the decks in preparation. Yesterday I gathered a large bag of clothes for a local charity shop, and today I was gratified to see two items displayed in their window (looking much more elegant on the dummies than they ever did on me). It's nice to see that one's donations are useful, instead of accepted-with-profuse-thanks-then-chucked-in-a-bin, but the year I spent working in an OXFAM taught me a thing or three about discriminating between good clothes for resale, rags for recycling, and rags for the bin! The things some people donated still bring a shudder to my bones.
Today's combined decluttering & charitable recycling project was to package up the last year's run of New Scientist magazine and send it to Book Aid, though I think this is the last year I'll do it. Book Aid started out collecting donations of books and journals for use in developing countries, both for general literacy and for students of particular areas. Over the eight years since I started donating it has become much more restrictive about what it will accept; at first it was New Scientists up to 2 years old and books up to 5 years old, last year they would only take a complete annual run of NS only - no gaps. I checked their website before posting off this year's batch (having hunted for hours to find the elusive 4 June issue, which was not in any of the main five places we shove old New Scientists), to see that they have a huge backlog of donations and are not currently accepting unsolicited second hand books. I e-mailed to ask whether my New Scientists were included in this, and whether they'd like them or they'd rather I recycled them and sent a donation of what the postage would have cost me (~£10). I got the reply "We do receive a lot of New Scientist magazines but we can always use them as we can a donation. I am afraid we cannot make the decision for you." which looks to me like they'd prefer the money. For 2005 they are getting the magazines (I've spent so much effort keeping them all year I'm blowed if someone's not going to benefit from them), but in future I'll recycle as I go and give them a monetary donation each year so they can buy books people actually need.
I suspect Book Aid has been lumbered with many cubic metres of unusable crap, and I must admit my first thought when I heard about it was "At last! A good home for my grandfather's 1965 textbooks on thermionic valves!" But the training in identifying unsaleable crap kicked in, and they are (mostly) in the bin now. Books! In a bin! It burns me, it does, my precious.
But the box is all posted off now - at 9.2 kg it was an effort to carry it to the Post Office, my hands getting number as tiny micro-flakes of snow began to fall.
Today's combined decluttering & charitable recycling project was to package up the last year's run of New Scientist magazine and send it to Book Aid, though I think this is the last year I'll do it. Book Aid started out collecting donations of books and journals for use in developing countries, both for general literacy and for students of particular areas. Over the eight years since I started donating it has become much more restrictive about what it will accept; at first it was New Scientists up to 2 years old and books up to 5 years old, last year they would only take a complete annual run of NS only - no gaps. I checked their website before posting off this year's batch (having hunted for hours to find the elusive 4 June issue, which was not in any of the main five places we shove old New Scientists), to see that they have a huge backlog of donations and are not currently accepting unsolicited second hand books. I e-mailed to ask whether my New Scientists were included in this, and whether they'd like them or they'd rather I recycled them and sent a donation of what the postage would have cost me (~£10). I got the reply "We do receive a lot of New Scientist magazines but we can always use them as we can a donation. I am afraid we cannot make the decision for you." which looks to me like they'd prefer the money. For 2005 they are getting the magazines (I've spent so much effort keeping them all year I'm blowed if someone's not going to benefit from them), but in future I'll recycle as I go and give them a monetary donation each year so they can buy books people actually need.
I suspect Book Aid has been lumbered with many cubic metres of unusable crap, and I must admit my first thought when I heard about it was "At last! A good home for my grandfather's 1965 textbooks on thermionic valves!" But the training in identifying unsaleable crap kicked in, and they are (mostly) in the bin now. Books! In a bin! It burns me, it does, my precious.
But the box is all posted off now - at 9.2 kg it was an effort to carry it to the Post Office, my hands getting number as tiny micro-flakes of snow began to fall.
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