Domestic catchup

Cloudy view

I suspect I've taken some variation of this picture more times than I'm aware of, but I don't think I've posted any of them before, and I do love this picture.

Today was the cleanup and catch-up day. I've now done the grocery shopping and restocked the house, put away all of the clothes, finished unpacking, made my monthly charitable donations, and caught up on all of the paper mail, both the stack from before vacation and the mail that accumulated during vacation. The mail took most of the day, since it's one of those tasks that needs to be done weekly for me to stay on top of it and it had been about five weeks.

But it's all done, the place looks much more clean, and I've been snacking on good food. Which I should do less of, now that I'm back from vacation, but I'm getting a lot of exercise, so I'm not worrying too much about it.

No work on-line today other than a bit of AFS server balancing.

The new charity find this month is Swords to Plowshares, a local Bay Area charity devoted to helping reduce poverty and homelessness in veterans in the Bay Area and heal the lingering wounds of war, with an excellent overhead to service ratio.

I have mixed feelings about supporting military charities. I'm increasingly of the opinion that while there may be just wars, that doesn't describe any of the ones we've been fighting, and the US is abusing its military power in crusades that are at best ineffectual. However, I also believe that the people who are serving in the military are, by and large, doing so for the highest and best of motives and truly believe they're helping the country, and their misuse and abuse by the US government is largely not their fault. And the effect of war on the soldiers is truly horrible, way beyond what I think most had any idea they were signing up for. This organization caught my eye because it's local, because their web site explicitly talks about how war leaves wounds and suffering, and because it's not affiliated with traditional military organizations that support other things that I'm not as comfortable supporting.

Posted: 2009-11-08 00:12 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04