the_rck | Entries tagged with charity

The Fandom Trumps Hate,

fth2019offerings, auction has opened for bidding. The listings are sortable by tag, and there's a lot of stuff offered.

My offering is here. The current high bid is $15 for a 5K-10K words fic written by me. I had to specify fandoms and offered Weiss Kreuz, Labyrinth, and Narnia, but I'm open to writing most fandoms that I've written before, including but not limited to sequels of previous fics by me.

The browsing period for Fandom Trumps Hate has started. There are several days left for people to look over the offerings and decide what to bid on. The list of offerings is here:

fth2019offerings.

Each post there has links for bidding, but bidding won't start until, I think, the 26th. The posts are, sadly, not alphabetized. I think they're relying on tags for find specific people's offers and for finding offers in specific fandoms.

My particular thread is here. I offered Weiss Kreuz, Chronicles of Narnia (books), and Labyrinth (1986).

I was limited to three fandoms (unless I wanted to offer 'any' which really meant anything at all that the winning bidder wanted me to read/watch/listen to and then write) but am open to negotiation about fandom, especially if it's something I've written before. Any rating (but with details of explicit fic subject to some caveats and negotiation). Length at least 5K words.

I'll post the links again next week. I thought I'd post now so that people can browse a bit to see if there might be other things offered that appeal to them, even if my offer doesn't.

I have signed up to offer fic for the Fandom Trumps Hate Auction this year. See

fandomtrumpshate for the schedule and other information. I had to specify fandoms and was limited to three, so I offered Narnia, Labyrinth, and Weiss Kreuz. I'm open to writing other things, though, as long as they're things I know and am reasonably comfortable with.

My assumption is that I'll get one or two bids and end up writing Narnia. I don't know that my trio of fandoms offered is going to be widely enticing. None of them were on the drop down list of popular fandoms for this year or last year (there wasn't anything on that list that I could offer without a vast number of caveats and limitations).

I will mention this again when the browsing period begins (offers become public) and when the bidding begins. The bidding period is only a few days. I said that the winning bidder could donate to any of the auction's list of charities (to be found here) because they all seem like groups that do necessary work and could use more money.

I’m not sure I should laugh at this, but I have to wonder what adult let the second graders put out a fancy poster advertising a 'Drive to Support Homelessnes' (sic).

Looking at the poster, I’m quite sure that a bunch of seven year olds didn’t put the thing together without adult input— The photo doesn’t look likely to have come from one of the approved image databases the school uses. There’s only one spelling error. The text and the image are balanced. The colors are neither garish nor vanishing into the background of the photo. And so on.

What they’re actually trying to do is get people to donate supplies to help members of the local homeless community survive the winter. I support that, and I’m going to see if I can find anything useful we can donate. I’m not convinced that my old sleeping bag with a broken zipper (it’s stuck halfway down the side and won’t budge in either direction) would actually help. I mean, it’s better than nothing and is Army surplus and so quite warm, but… broken zipper.

Crossposts: http://therck.livejournal.com/997183.html

I’ve done most of the easy preparation for the cleaning lady. We’ve got four bags and two bins in the living room that are filled with things we want to get rid of. I’d like to get them out of the living room, but I have no idea where to put them except in the basement which I think will lead them sitting for months.

I’m trying to decide if the dishwasher is full enough to run. We’re out of forks, but everything else is manageable. I’m just quite sure that, if I wait until after dinner, there will be too many dishes to fit.

We’re also frustratingly at the point of needing to cook in order to have something for dinner but also at the point when we’re close enough to leaving for a few days that we won’t finish all of the leftovers. But the chicken in the fridge won’t keep until we get back, so cooking it is pretty important. Maybe I should put that in the pressure cooker now. When that’s done, I’ll have enough dishes to fill the dishwasher.

I want to buy some StoryBundle books, but I know that I don’t read books if I buy them. I just don’t. But there are about three books in that bundle that I want, and buying them in paper would cost more than buying the entire bundle as ebooks.

I also want to give some money to the local food bank. I’m probably going to do it, not a lot but at least a little. I know that summer is really hard for families with kids because of the lack of school meals, and I know that the food bank can do a vast amount with even small monetary donations.

I didn’t end up going for a walk, and at this point, it’s warm enough that I probably won’t until after dark tonight.

I went to bed when Scott did last night. That was 9:00 which was late for him, given when he had to get up, but quite early for me. We turned out our lights before Cordelia did. I didn’t sleep as well as I’d have liked to because I was way too warm and didn’t figure out that that was the problem for quite a while.

I ended up poking at ideas for a fic. I’m trying to decide how far to change canon because the point at which I want to set it doesn’t entirely work. I want two particular characters to interact, but in canon, the second character arrives after several other people do, and the two characters are only in the same place for a few seconds. I have an idea for an interesting interaction between the first character and a third character, but the prompt was for a particular pairing. I suppose I could shift to a different point in time, but I really like the potential dynamics right then, so I don’t know.

We only got three political calls yesterday. I expected more, given the primary today, but we got one Sanders, one Clinton, and one Kasich, and none after about 7:00. I’m a little surprised not to have gotten many so far today (just one, Sanders). Polls have been open for hours now. I am going to wait for Scott to get home this afternoon and go vote then. He started his shift at 3:00 a.m., so they can’t keep him too much past 3:00 p.m.

Apparently, I can’t donate those protein drink supplement samples. Scott’s been drinking them, and there’s only one left. At least, they got used. Definitely a cash donation to the food bank is the way to go. I suspect that the folks who work there will have a much better idea of what’s useful and of how to make things stretch than I do.

I’m debating doing Camp NaNo in April or signing up for

wipbigbang. I feel like I need to do something to get myself moving, but I worry about committing to something and getting sick again. I’m just not sure if I’ll write without making a commitment of some sort.

I slept until about 11 this morning, and I pretty easily could have stayed in bed for hours more. This is fairly discouraging as I have things I want to get done. I was hoping to both change our sheets and to try Sit and Be Fit for the first time since I broke my foot last March. I’m not sure I’m going to manage both. I’ve stripped the bed and gotten the fitted sheet in place (I had to rest in between those steps). I’ve got an hour before Sit and Be Fit. In that time, I need to eat lunch and start a load of laundry. I just feel exhausted already, enough so that I’m not sure about managing either task.

Lunch ought not be hard. I’ve got a serving of baked beans in the fridge. Putting that in a bowl and microwaving it shouldn’t be all that challenging. But somehow, it is.

The schools are doing a food drive this week with an eye toward supplying kids who rely on school for breakfast and lunch during the summer when there is no school. I kind of want to search the cupboards for things we could donate, but I suspect that giving money to the food bank (there’s a url for doubling one’s donation via matching funds from a couple of big donors) will be where I end up going. Chances are that that would be more useful than whatever we happen to have in our cupboards. Though I probably should give the nutritional supplement drink samples I got from the cancer center nutritionist last fall and never touched. Those are mentioned specifically as something the food bank can use, and I’m not going to use them.

I managed to do something to my neck by reading in bed yesterday, and it still hurts like the dickens. Applying heat helps a little, so I’ve been doing that.

Yesterday’s light headedness persisted and got kind of headachy. My legs also started aching which usually means I’m coming down with something that involves a fever. I ended up going to bed about 8:30 and then reading in bed until after 10:00. I kept thinking I’d sleep soon. I feel much better this morning, though, and I’ve got a list of things I want to get done.

I forgot to mention— I talked to my mother Monday afternoon. She actually called me which is something that almost never happens. She says that the reason I couldn’t reach them was that they had to put their dog to sleep on her birthday (also their wedding anniversary). It was unexpected, and the vet thinks that it was some sort of cancer that caused a rupture with internal bleeding. The dog was about fourteen, so they’d known they didn’t have much time left, but she’d seemed perfectly healthy, physically, just mentally very confused.

I’m trying to read the Welcome to Night Vale novel before it’s due on Sunday. There is a longish waitlist, so I can’t renew it. I rather wish I’d started it sooner because I can’t read it in chunks longer than about fifteen pages. When I go longer than that, my mind just kind of stops processing what’s going on as interesting. Reading short bits is fun, though.

I lost about two hours of working time this morning to an OS update for my laptop. I really wish that downloading such things was faster. I’m not normally big on the notion of switching away from Earthlink DSL because they’ve been good to us, but downloads take so very, very long. Of course, there was also a download for some sort of camera communication software that I didn’t want but couldn’t figure out how to refuse.

I’m very, very close to leveling up in Ingress. If I don’t do it sooner, it will happen either Sunday when we go to the library or Tuesday when I go to PT.

Cordelia’s school had a water drive for Flint. We didn’t end up sending anything in because we kept forgetting to go to the store at points when we could go. I ended up giving money to the Genesee County United Way chapter, specifically for buying water filters for people in Flint. The goal of the campaign is to keep buying new filters for people for as long as they’re needed. It’s not a great solution, but it may be easier to keep up with than trying to provide people with sufficient bottled water to keep going for as long as this is going to take. Bottled water is just showier.

The only charities I could find doing this sort of work were the United Way, the American Red Cross, and Catholic Charities of Genesee County (and I found the last two only via a CNN article). 'flint water donate' brought up a lot of news stories about celebrities and corporations donating to relief efforts but not much else. The Genesee County United Way only has a two star rating on Charity Navigator, but I decided that the things they were getting dinged for weren’t things that would impact this campaign. 83% of what’s given to them goes for programs, and most of the things that Charity Navigator listed as negatives are probably more the result of being small than of corruption or gross incompetence. I’m not discounting incompetence, of course, but if 83% of my donation goes to water filters, I’m pleased by that.

Today, I want to do a load of laundry, bake cookies or cake, bake bread (which requires cleaning the pan first), and write. Oh, and I want to read a chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and comment on it for that Narnia forum I visit occasionally. I said I’d do it over the weekend, and somehow, I didn’t get to it. I don’t think it will take very long. Those chapters aren’t dreadfully long, and I’m just looking for whatever ideas occur to me as I read.

Speaking of writing, on LJ

indelicateink is hosting a small, informal fic exchange. It basically consists of people offering prompts and/or listing the things they’re willing to write. It’s mostly focused on Weiss Kreuz and Saiyuki because that’s the crowd reading there, but

indelicateink has said that other fandoms are welcome, just that they may not get the same level of response. I haven’t commented there yet, but I’m going to. I’ve just got a dozen other small things (mostly responses to LJ and DW comments) that I want to get to first. I also have to think about it and see if I can come up with any prompts. I’m terrible at that part of this sort of thing. Most of what’s there right now is prompts.

This morning's radiation appointment ran long. Well, the radiation part of it finished on time. It's just that, on Thursdays, I'm supposed to check in with my doctor. I ended up talking to about four different doctors who all asked me mostly the same questions. They were a little concerned about my physical symptoms, but, if they're anxiety related as seems likely, there's damn all any of us can do about it. I'll be seeing my psychiatrist on Tuesday, but she can't very well put me on something new right now, and even if she did, it wouldn't start being effective until around the time I finish radiation (if it was effective at all). The first doctor was young, and he seemed to think that consulting a psychiatrist would result in me magically doing better right away.

Scott was stuck at work until around 5:00 yesterday due to a mandatory training. This came after he had one of the worst days of work that he's had in a long time and with no advance notice. He got home and went straight to the shower because we were expecting visitors at 7:00.

I had been hoping to ask him to pick up some groceries on his way home, but the timing was bad for that. I can't, unfortunately, ask him to do it today, either, because he needs to get home and showered as fast as possible so that we can meet my sister and brother for dinner. The problem is that I don't really have much in the house that I can bring myself to eat right now. The only reason I ate anything at all for lunch yesterday is that I ordered a Jimmy John's sandwich at almost 2:30 (and it arrived in time that I was able to, just, finish it before Cordelia and her friends arrived home). I'd been home since noon, but I felt too sick to eat for quite a while and then couldn't face any of the food we had.

We worked on Stargate: SG-1 characters last night. Well, most people did. I kind of stared off into space. I really, really want my brain back. I think Scott and I will have to find a time for him to walk me through character creation because I'm not likely to do it without him (or somebody equally patient) right there, pushing me along. I'm also not sure I'm up to making decisions of the sort that I need to make in terms of assigning points and picking skills and all of that. I'm probably going to be a scientist with a ROTC background.

I have not set up transportation for tomorrow. My current plan, if weather is decent, is to take the bus. It's not ideal when I'm already hugely anxious, but I'm going to have to take the bus again eventually, and I'd rather that the first time be before I start having side effects from the radiation.

If I don't take the bus tomorrow (and even if I do), I will take it into town on Tuesday. My current plan for that is to find myself lunch somewhere around there and then meet

evalerie at Library Lane. I'm not sure what I'll do for lunch. I have time, most likely, to go to Totoro-- My appointment will finish at 11:30 or 11:40, and I need to meet my ride at about 12:55. It's a walk of several blocks and is farther than I've walked since I broke my foot in March, though. There's a diner much closer that's passable. There are other restaurants around, and I could try something new, but I'm not sure that I can handle the anxiety that doing that would add to what I'll be experiencing already. Going to one of the places I've been to before will be horribly hard. I really don't want anything harder.

Cordelia and her friends are continuing to work on trying to raise money for charity. I'm not sure that all of their schemes will come to fruition, but it's an admirable goal. Last spring, they gave $80 to water.org (Scott and I vetted the charity for them. I want to teach them how to do it for themselves). Cordelia says that, next year, they want to donate to some sort of breast cancer charity. I wonder if I could get away with pointing them toward Planned Parenthood with the idea of earmarking the funds for helping pay for mammograms? Whatever happens, I'm steering them away from Susan G. Komen. Scott and I did point out that there are a lot more people in the world who need help with water security than who need help with breast cancer screening and treatment, that water is a more fundamental thing and that the kids wouldn't be doing anything wrong if they decided that putting their money toward water security again was the right thing to do.