I will start by saying that I intend to tell this as if I were telling it to my 10-year-old who FAINTED when he saw a child at school get a nosebleed. I will be careful and gentle.

I have mentioned before that I like to donate blood regularly as one of my own Nice Things We Do For Other People things. For me it’s relatively easy, and while I guess I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “enjoyable,” I’m glad to do it and I get a pleasant feeling of doing-nice-things satisfaction from it.

But will you catch me nagging YOU to do it, or whining that you don’t? No. Well, I mean, you might catch me ENCOURAGING you to do it if you’re scared, and wishing that more people would donate—but if you DON’T donate, it’s not just that I won’t SAY anything negative, I won’t THINK anything negative. Many, many people CAN’T donate blood. There are tons of reasons: underweight, low blood pressure, low iron, various medications or heath states, vein problems, fainting, etc.

And many, many people CAN donate blood but DON’T WANT TO for a large number of assorted reasons, and those people are doing DIFFERENT things that help other people. We should each choose our OWN things; we can’t ALL do ALL the things, so if we each do our own selection, we will cover the most ground. Some of us donate money/clothes/food to charity; some of us volunteer at animal shelters or nursing homes or food pantries or crisis lines; some of us peer out our windows to make sure Those Kids aren’t getting Up To No Good out there; some of us cook for families that are sick or have a new baby; some of us tutor or mentor; some of us serve on committees or boards; some of us promote causes or work to raise awareness/action; some of us pick up litter while we walk the dog; some of us put a penny in the “Take a Penny, Leave a Penny” dish—there are all KINDS of unpaid, for-the-good-of-humanity things that need to be done, and it makes the most sense for each of us to do the things that we are most drawn to and the things that work best with our own skill sets. I don’t WANT to do a charity walk, and I’m not skilled at tutoring—but I DO want to give blood, and I have GORGEOUS veins.

If you think you might want to make blood-donating one of YOUR things, but you are nervous about it, or you feel nervous (as I do) about New Things when you don’t know how things will go or what they will be like, I will tell you about it. There will be slight variations from donation center to donation center, but I’ve given in six different states/centers now, and it’s been roughly the same at each one.

The first step is find a place to donate. (No, wait: probably the first step is finding out if you’re eligible.) Some areas have a donation center that’s open all the time; in other areas, the Red Cross sets up blood drives at churches or town halls or schools or other buildings that have enough room and can donate the space, and they’ll be there once every two weeks or once a month or something like that. You can search by zip code to find a place near you. I thought at first that there was nothing near me that had hours I was available to donate, but then it turned out there’s an every-4-weeks evening thing less than two miles from my house.

Some drives allow you to make an appointment, and others don’t. I haven’t found it makes much difference in waiting time: at my most recent drive, I overheard two other donors talking, and one said he’s found he waits 15 minutes if he has an appointment, or half an hour if he doesn’t. That sounds about right for that location. So if you do better if you can drop by on the spur of the moment, it’s not a huge deal not to have an appointment. I like to have an appointment, though, because otherwise I have trouble remembering when it’s been 8 weeks (you can donate every 8 weeks). I bring a book, and the waiting is time when no one is BOTHERING me. Also, bring ID.

When you first arrive, you check in. A volunteer gives you a sticker with your name on it and asks you to read a packet of information. If it’s your first time, read it; after the first time, skim it for a couple of minutes and turn all the pages so it looks like you’re a responsible donor. It tells you things like, “Please don’t donate blood if you are HIV-positive” and “You can’t donate if you’ve donated less than 8 weeks ago” and “Here are the tests we perform on your blood and the information of yours we’ll share” and “If you’re in high school, here are your specific rules.” This is also when you get any goodies the particular drive might be giving out: a certificate for a free pint of ice cream at a local place, or a certificate for a free Subway sub, or a free bag of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, or a Red Cross t-shirt—that sort of thing.

From check-in, you go to the waiting area. In most of the places where I’ve donated, I’ve been given a number, but in one place they called by first name. When it’s your turn, an employee in a white coat will take you into a cubical. If it’s your first time donating, you’ll need to give your name, social security number, date of birth, address, phone number, etc.; after the first time, you’ll have an ID card they can scan to call up your profile. If you’ve ever donated under another name, you’ll have to give that information every single time, which seems silly to me, and it’s such a hassle, and then you have to re-state your birthdate each time they enter another name, so now I have those two previous names and my birthdate written on a card I keep with my blood donor ID card so I can just hand it to them and they can copy it.

They’ll take your pulse and your blood pressure and your temperature, and they’ll glance at the veins that run along the insides of your elbows, and they’ll ask if you’re allergic to latex, and then comes my least favorite part of the whole thing: they’ll set up a little plastic shield between them and your hand, and they’ll prick your finger to get a drop or two of blood to test your iron. It doesn’t even hurt all that much, but it’s sudden (the little needle goes kerchunk) and then they SQUEEZE your finger hard, especially if your hands are cold. Anyway, the anticipation is worse than anything else. And incidentally, I take iron tablets in the days before a donation so I won’t be turned down for low iron; it’s one of the most common things women are turned down for, and it’s a shame to get all the way to that point and then go home.

If you’ve passed everything so far, it’s time for Many Questions. When I first started donating, the employee had to ask all the questions verbally; now at the place I donate, they leave you with a computer and you can do it that way, which is WAY BETTER, especially since some of the questions are Quite Embarrassing: “Have you ever had sex for money?” “Have you ever had sex with a man who has had sex with another man?” Other questions are less blushy: “Have you ever visited any of these countries?” “Have you ever taken any of these medications?” “Have you had a tattoo in the last year?” Some questions, even if you answer the way you think is “wrong” (yes, I’ve had a vaccination; yes, I’ve had contact with someone else’s blood), it’s still okay: they just have to ask a follow-up question (oh, it was just a flu shot; oh, it was just your son’s blood when he skinned his knee).

If everything is fine with the questions, you’ll be given a paper to read and sign: you check to make sure your name and social security number and birthdate are correct, and you read a paragraph about how you’re releasing this donation for their use. It probably says some other things about not suing them if you pass out on the donation chair and fall off and break your arm.

This is when they take you over to the donation area. Most places ask which arm you’d prefer to use; I usually choose left because I’m right-handed, but a couple of times they haven’t asked and they’ve used my right arm and I haven’t noticed any real problem using that arm afterward. I’m just slightly squicked, that’s all. And when I have a babe-in-arms, I use my right arm on purpose for the donation, because I carry a child with my left arm.

The donation chairs are like lawn lounge chairs, so your legs stick out straight in front of you. If it’s your first donation, some places encourage you to let them adjust the chair so that you’re lying down and your legs are elevated; other places just ask you every five seconds how you’re feeling. During one of my donations I felt sick all of a sudden, and they immediately adjusted the chair so I was lying down with my feet elevated, which helped tremendously though I felt silly (this was in college, with cute boys all around SEEING ME HORIZONTAL OMG).

The employee at the chairs might be the same one who did the temperature and pulse and questions, or it might be someone new. They’ll put your arm on a little armrest tray, and ask you to confirm your name. They’ll put one million little ID stickers on one million bags and vials and papers; one of those stickers/papers will be for you to take home in case you suddenly think of a reason they shouldn’t use your blood.

They’ll put a blood pressure cuff on your arm and give you a little foam thingie or stress ball to hold, then mark your vein with a permanent marker and ask you to hold still. If you’re twitchy and you move a little anyway, it’s not a huge deal—it’s just that they are about to wash your elbow pit very thoroughly with dark-staining iodine, and the mark helps them to see the vein afterward. But they can still see it even if you move and the mark isn’t in the right place anymore. Just TRY not to.

They’ll use a big q-tip thing to wash your arm with iodine (they’ll ask first if you’re allergic to it) for what seems like a very long time (I think it’s 30 seconds). Then they use a second substance, I don’t know what it is, and they just do one swirl with that. Then they’ll ask you to give a few squeezes on the stress ball and then keep squeezing, and this is where you should avert your eyes and take a breath if you’re squeamish: they’ll say “Little pinch now” and use the needle. It will STING for a few seconds, and they’ve told me why but I forget. The iodine? An anti-coagulant on the needle? I forget. Anyway, just for a few seconds.

Then you’re supposed to squeeze the stress ball every few seconds. They’ll keep checking the bag and at some point they’ll fill a few vials (for testing, I think), but none of that feels like anything. When there’s a pint in the bag (it takes five or ten minutes, typically), you’re done: they’ll press some gauze over the needle and then the needle will be gone quick like a bunny, and they’ll have you press the gauze now and hold your arm straight up in the air for a minute. Then they give you a bandaid, check your name one more time, and send you to canteen.

THE BEST PART: you have to sit quietly for a little while and have a snack. It’s typical for local restaurants to donate snacks, so sometimes there are doughnuts or pastries or pizzas—but if there’s not, there’s usually cookies/brownies, or packets of snack crackers, or boxes of raisins, or…well, you’ll have to find out. If you have dietary restrictions, you can bring your own snack. Some places have you sit for a certain number of minutes and even have a sort of matron in place to make sure you don’t leave before you’ve said you feel okay; other places, like mine, you just sit for ten-ish minutes and then go. And if back at your house it’s time for the bedtime routine, maybe you sit for more like twenty minutes and have a second slice of pizza.

The whole thing all together, from arrival to done-with-snack, takes 1 to 1.5 hours, mostly depending on the time spent in the waiting area.

GEEZ, this freaks me out:

It’s Amazon.com’s ad for their swim section, and they show it to me each time I place an order, on the “Thanks, your order has been placed” page. To me it looks like she’s DROWNED—well, or drownING, since there are still bubbles. But in any case, she does not look like she is heading for the surface any time soon, and her facial expression is not right, and what is with her FULL MAKE-UP, and her neck tendons look like comic book drawings, and she sure doesn’t exude WILL TO LIVE, and also her swimsuit straps don’t match, and the upshot is that I’m startled every time I see the ad. She doesn’t look like she’s SWIMMING, she looks like she’s SINKING. And the water doesn’t look like a nice place to swim, either.

I was out this morning running errands and having lunch with my mom. When I got home, I read all the comments on the post about the cat, and I had renewed hope. Paul was out on errands too, so I waited impatiently for him to come home so I could go get the cat without having to bring Henry with me. I imagined how I’d come home afterward and do a post that was just a picture of the cat. AND THE CROWD GOES WILD.

We drove to the shelter—and there was a “HOLD” sign on the cat’s cage. I found a worker and asked if holds ever fall through, and she said, “Oh, sure, yes! We can take your name and call you if they don’t come back. Which cat?” When I said the cat’s name, she said, “Oh. Actually, they’re filling out the paperwork right now.” The kids wanted to look at the other cats, so I saw My Cat being taken out in a cat carrier.

So. If I’d gotten back from errands a little earlier, if I hadn’t waited for Paul but had instead just taken Henry with me, if I’d posted my post last night instead of this morning—that cat would be home with me now, and this post would be a picture of him. I am thinking of it this way: that maybe the people who took him (it was a woman in her 40s and a woman in her 60s) NEEDED a cat without claws, but didn’t want to declaw a cat so had been waiting for an already-declawed rescue cat to become available. And now they will take him home and he will be very happy, and we will find another cat later and be GLAD this one fell through, because we will like the other one so much. In any case, it’s happy that cat gets to go home now.

I went to the animal shelter yesterday to drop off some more donation clothes (they have one of those fundraising dumpsters), and while I was there I went in “just to look” at the cats, “just for fun.” My household is a three-cat household with two cats, and so the cat vacuum needs to be filled—but we thought it would be nice to have some two-cat time first, so I haven’t been actively looking. On the other hand, it’s so tempting—like browsing baby name books when you’re not actively trying but you’ve entered the “it would be fine if it happened” time.

So I went in to look, and I found a great cat. Exactly the cat I was looking for. We’d like to STAGGER our cats a bit more this time, so that we don’t have three elderly cats at the same time with all their expenses and problems and stresses and sad dyings, and we have a 2-year-old cat and a 1-year-old cat so we’d like the new cat to be at least 5 years old, and this cat was 7 years old. Which is also pleasing since older cats can be harder to find homes for.

Also, this isn’t at all necessary, but I do ENJOY getting different fur colors each time, so it’s not crucial but a BONUS would be a new kind of fur, and this cat was patches of orange fur and white fur, which we’ve never had.

A lot of times, when I look at the cat and then the little descriptions on the cages, the cat sounds perfect until I get to the part where it says the cat doesn’t get along with other cats, or doesn’t do well with small children—and there are a lot of cats like that at a shelter, because that’s one of the big reasons WHY a cat gets brought to a shelter. But THIS cat’s description said he’s easy-going and gets along great with young children, other cats, and even dogs.

AND, a clincher: it said “He’ll want to sleep on your bed, so be prepared!” I LOVE a cat on the bed at night. And this cat is a nice big solid cat.

Furthermore, the cat was working the pity vote: lots of cats seem like they don’t mind being at the shelter, but this cat looked, as I described him to my mother, “like he just wants to GO HOME,” and my mother agreed completely. (Did I mention she was with me? She was with me, and so was Henry.) He didn’t come to the cage door to pick at it or bonk his head against it like some of the other cats do; he had his head toward the far corner and he looked like he’d lost hope. And yet when I put my hand at the cage bars, he came right over and rubbed his jaw/cheek on my fingers.

I think that cat would be here at our house right now, except for one thing: the description said his front paws were declawed and so he should be an indoors-only cat. And we have two indoor/outdoor cats, and they have a cat door so they can come and go freely, and we have children going in and out all the time so we wouldn’t be able to reasonably expect to be able to contain a cat that WANTED to go out.

So. I went home, without the cat. But I’m feeling sad about the cat. I KNOW I will like other cats just as well, and that if we don’t get THIS cat there will be ANOTHER cat later. And in fact when we get that hypothetical future cat, Hypothetical Future Me will be saying, “Boy, I’m glad we didn’t get that OTHER cat, because then imagine: we wouldn’t have THIS cat!” But right now I still find my mind turning the problem over and over, trying to find a way we could take the cat. Could we TRY to keep him indoors while letting the other two out? No. Could we keep the other two cats exclusively indoors as well? No. CLAW REATTACHMENT SURGERY? No.

IS there any way this could work? I was thinking I might go to the shelter on Sunday (I take Henry and one of the big kids on an outing on Sunday, and the animal shelter is a popular destination), and if the cat is still there I could talk to one of the people who works there about it. I also thought about calling the vet to ask HER. Because the shelter leans very hard toward keeping cats indoors, and what I thought I remembered was that a front-declawed cat COULD go outside, especially if they have a cat door they can run to, because in a pinch they can climb trees with their back claws and just use their front paws for balance? Like, that you wouldn’t declaw an indoor/outdoor cat—but that if the cat were ALREADY declawed, as in this situation, all was not lost on the outdoors thing as long as the back paws still had claws.

It astonishes me again and again the way I can get totally caught up on something, feel all amazed that it is not so hard if I just work on it consistently, feel so good about being caught up, feel so happy viewing daily the results of my labor—and then let it fall right back again because I don’t really want to work on it consistently and/or there are only so many things there’s time in a day to work on consistently and that bag of library books is not going to read itself.

Most recently I’ve done this with the laundry and with the decluttering. I don’t know why I ran out of steam on the decluttering: it felt so good to get the dining room done, and some of the basement done, and then I worked for awhile on Elizabeth’s room—and as soon as Elizabeth’s room was no longer a fire hazard, I lost my oomph. I think I just have a fairly high clutter tolerance, and it takes significant effort to force my tolerance lower. This is probably a trait I should be grateful for rather than trying to fight and change, since I think otherwise I might go mad in this house of cluttermakers.

And the laundry, I find I enjoy it more if there is a feeling of urgency: Rob is wearing HIS LAST PAIR of pants! or whatever. It makes me feel like I’m doing Important Work rather than keeping up with household drudgery no one notices: “Here are two more pairs of clean pants to add to your five pairs of clean pants.” Plus, it goes faster if I can do a whole load of one thing: it’s much faster/easier to fold a whole load of shirts for the two boys who share a room, than it is to fold a load of several shirts, several pairs of pants, several sets of pajamas, a stack of underwear, and a pile of socks, all distributed among four different bureaus.

Last night my mom and dad and my mom’s friend Donna and I tried to figure out who would be next in line for the British throne if Charles died before he was king. You would think there would be a simple and quick “just look it up” kind of answer to this question, but YOU WOULD BE MISTAKEN. We even had Donna call in a lifeline, phoning her trivia-knowledgeable husband to ask him. (To his credit and our amusement, he didn’t act at all surprised about being called at 9:00 at night with a question about British rules of succession. Donna says this kind of thing happens to him all the time.)

To ME, it makes sense that if one of Queen Elizabeth’s children dies before she hands over the crown, she would instead hand it to another of her children. Instead, after about an hour of poring over various sites (none of which agreed with each other), it appears that even though Charles hasn’t yet been crowned, his descendants (I will never spell that word right the first time) are already lined up JUST AS IF HE WERE crowned—so if Charles died, Queen Elizabeth would give the crown to William. (This assumes the verb “give” will ever apply to her relationship to the crown, which I doubt.)

But…why skip the generation? Why not have someone of the exact same “rank” (child of the queen) fill that slot of queen’s heir, instead of skipping over those same-rank people and going a rank lower? It seems like the rule is something like “preference is given to the firstborn AND to the firstborn’s line, over any otherborn or otherborn’s line”—but that doesn’t explain the WHY to me, and also there were spots in the lines of succession we were looking at that didn’t seem to follow this rule. Finally we had to agree that we would just have to wait and see what happened: if Charles DOES die before his mother, THEN we will find out for sure. Until then, it doesn’t matter anyway.

********

Are you going to watch the royal wedding a week from tomorrow? I’m already aware that huge swaths of the population couldn’t care less about it, and a list of who’s NOT watching would be hard to file, so it’s more that I’m wondering who among us has a “yes” reply to this question, and I will assume the rest are “no, this is not among my personal set of interests, just as some of my personal interests are not among yours—and that doesn’t mean that either set of interests is superior to the other.”

I’m hoping to figure out a way to watch it on television AND be on Twitter, because I think that kind of thing is fun. Maybe I’ll see if I can borrow my dad’s laptop. Or…can it be watched on the computer? I don’t know about these things, and it seems boring to research it. Oh! It looks like we can watch it on YouTube? That’s probably what I’ll do, unless it ends up being reallllllllly slow on my computer. Or….I don’t know, how are YOU doing it? And are you having snacks? Because I’m having snacks.

I was talking to Indigo Girl about this on Twitter, and then realized, no, this is something I need to share with THE WORLD: I was at the grocery store this week, and the clerk DIDN’T KNOW WHAT CHOCOLATE CHIPS WERE.

Shall I pause? Do you need a moment?

I was buying quite a pile of bags of them because they were on a good sale (and as an aside, fellow customers: “SOMEONE’S doing a lot of baking!” can be said in a whole range of tones and with a whole range of accompanying facial expressions, and some of them are totally fine and some of them are TOTALLY RUDE AND YOU KNOW IT), and the clerk picked up one bag and turned it over in her hands and said, “What are these? Like, little chocolate candies?”

When I told Paul this story, he wanted to know if I’d been buying an exotic kind of chocolate chip, because some of those really do look like bags of little chocolate candies—but NO, these were regular Nestle Tollhouse Morsels, totally standard, yellow bag. And besides, it’s not like when I said, “…They’re chocolate chips. They’re for…baking?” she said, “Oh, duh, of course! I don’t know where my brain went for a minute there!” Instead she said, “Ohhhh!” in a tone of wonder. And I said, “Yeah. I use them in, like, cookies and muffins.” And she said, “Huh!” like I was telling her a novel way of seasoning asparagus. Then she added, oddly: “I only eat boxed chocolates.” She didn’t ACT like she was putting me on.

Nor did she seem like a recent arrival in this country: I know other countries have different standard baking ingredients, and that if I were to get a job in a grocery store in one of those countries I would likely look very foolish indeed, asking questions about absolutely ordinary items. But while I didn’t go so far as to verify this by examining her birth certificate, I’d say she was 100% standard United States teenager.

So. Anyway. Mystifying.

And speaking of mystifying, another Twitter topic that actually I want to talk longer about and to more people: What is with models in underwear ads looking so SULTRY? I totally get it when it’s underwear being marketed as GIFTS: in that case, I EXPECT the model to be sending the message “Your significant other would TOTALLY look this hot if you bought this fancy get-up, I PROMISE!”

But if it’s regular everyday cotton briefs, I want the model to just look…friendly. The same as she might look in jeans and a t-shirt. Like she’s saying, “Hey, this is a nice deal on the hi-cut cotton kind you like! I like to wear these myself! They’re comfy! And look, it’s a Bonus 4th Pair pack!” It doesn’t seem necessary for her to look like she’s trying to seduce me: _I_ know not to buy them based on how SHE looks in them, and besides, she is not my type.

As Misty pointed out, this problem is just as bad with men. When I’m at Target getting another 5-pack of cottons for Paul, I feel like telling the model on the wrapper to BACK OFF, FRESHY, I am buying these for MY HUSBAND. (Also, I think men look kind of stupid when they’re trying to look sexy.) (I mean, don’t they? They’re all “You know you want me: look how artfully I’ve arranged myself in this budget-friendly 100% cotton!” and I’m all “*trying to repress a snort of laughter while also wincing to think what his mother thinks of this*”.) I’d prefer the guy on the underwear wrapper (do you notice how very carefully I am avoiding the use of the word “package”?) to look like a GOOD FATHER and a NICE HUSBAND. Maybe he could look like someone else’s slightly flirty husband. But THAT’S AS FAR AS IT SHOULD GO.

I have often sung the praises of Freecycle, and I wanted to mention it this week since it’s Earth Day on Friday, and Freecycle is such an excellent way to do the REUSE part of reduce-reuse-recycle—er, and I guess the REDUCE part, too. I guess I’m a little confused about those three words, because they overlap so much. My point is that Freecycle keeps some stuff from being thrown out, and it keeps people from having to purchase some things, and the whole thing is a really good idea and is the kind of practical application of a big theoretical ideal (“We should save the earth!”) that I find very satisfying.

We’ve used it many times to avoid buying something: a crib, when Henry’s broke just six months before we planned to move him out of it; crutches when Rob twisted his ankle and only needed crutches for a few days; a toaster oven when we weren’t sure we’d use or like a toaster oven. We’ve used it to get rid of tons of stuff I felt was too “USEFUL!” to get rid of but didn’t have any urge to try to sell: baby equipment, pieces of furniture, clocks, lamps.

The downside of Freecycle is that you have to deal with people, and people can be unreliable cheeseheads. You’d THINK that if you were giving something to someone for free, something they said they wanted, something where THEY chose a convenient time for THEM to come get it, that they’d come get it. And yet again and again, unbelievably to me, they DON’T come to get it. We post an item as available, and there is a big clamor for it—several people saying “Ooo ooo pick me, pick me!” We choose someone; they say they’ll come the next morning, they are SO excited, they need this SO badly and have NO money. We have a moment of feeling good about the way Freecycle society works: those who have, give! those who need, receive! WHAT A GREAT SYSTEM!

Then the next morning comes and goes, and the item has not been picked up. Evening comes; still nothing. We contact the next person who was dying to have it, and they say they’ll come for it after work the next day. They don’t show up either.

And so on. What…IS this? I can’t figure out the motivation for saying you want something and then not showing up to get it. I understand it when it’s something that costs money: maybe someone acted impulsively and now doesn’t want to spend the money after all. I understand it when it’s “Come by the house later, honey, I have two boxes of junk to unload on you!” But I don’t understand it when it’s “Who wants this for free?” “ME ME ME ME ME!!!” “Okay!” “THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!! *never heard from again*”

I am feeling particularly riled right now, because I am trying to get rid of my maternity clothes. Normally I don’t bother giving away clothes on Freecycle, unless I happen to have a nice tidy group I’m getting rid of all at once; instead, I put them in a donation dumpster at the Humane Society. But plus-size maternity clothes are hard to find, and also I felt much squirrellier at the idea of putting them in a dumpster. So we put them on Freecycle.

MANY REPLIES. We picked the first one, and she said she was so relieved because she couldn’t find plus-sized maternity clothes anywhere, and could she come by this very evening? Yes! No show.

We contacted the second one. Oh, thank goodness, she hadn’t known WHAT she was going to do about clothes! She would be by in the morning. She emailed late morning to say she was having a bad bout of morning sickness and could she come after lunch? No show.

We contacted the third one, who said she couldn’t believe we’d had two no-shows! She’d had a lot of no-shows this week too! But she PROMISED she wouldn’t be a no-show, because she HATES no-shows! She couldn’t understand why people would even DO that! She would come get the clothes the next day. NO SHOW.

It’s frustrating. You might wonder if perhaps the clothes were in crummier shape than I could see with my sentimental eyes, and so maybe people DID show up but then tactfully left when they saw the clothes, and I thought of that too, but the bag was still knotted closed.

I put the clothes in the Humane Society dumpster. It’s no big deal, but that was a lot of fuss for nothing. LUCKILY, this doesn’t happen too often, and usually not more than one no-show per item (three was a record-breaker), or we’d probably stop doing Freecycle: it’s hard to stay motivated to give away your things for nothing if there’s a big hassle involved.

Ever since Paul rearranged our basement shelves into rows, and didn’t allow enough room for my hips in one of the rows, I’ve felt peevish and irritable about our basement storage.

When he “dealt with” the empty boxes he thinks I’m silly for keeping (says the guy who NEVER DOES ANY OF OUR MAILING OF ANY SORT, NOT EVEN GIFTS TO HIS OWN FAMILY, nor does he handle handmedown clothing storage) by tossing them ALL willy-nilly into that too-narrow aisle, making the aisle COMPLETELY INACCESSIBLE even to parts of the body narrower than my hips AND the boxes inaccessible as well, I priced online divorces and realized a cast iron skillet and a shovel were cheaper and faster and could be reused afterward.

Every time I try to get rid of some of our STUFF, I get stopped by that aisle: I can’t even get into it without taking out dozens and dozens of boxes—and doing it sideways. And the boxes were just TOSSED in there, so if you try to get one box, a whole bunch of other boxes tumble down around your ears. And I’m too mad about him making that mess (and it is SO CLASSIC: he will “store things” IN FRONT OF CLOSET DOORS, so every time I see THAT mess I remember all the other, SIMILAR messes) to make myself tackle doing the cleaning up. So I showed HIM: I left it that way for YEARS. More and more boxes accumulated: I couldn’t get to the ones he’d “stored,” so I saved new ones, which he sometimes added to the inaccessible pile.

Yesterday I HAD to have a box. I needed a box badly enough that it was worth rummaging in The Box Aisle. I got angry enough at my inability to find a SINGLE APPROPRIATE BOX that I flinged EVERY box out of that aisle.

I saved the few old moving boxes that are the perfect size to fit on the shelves we can now get to, and I stacked them at the far end of that aisle so that we can still ACCESS the aisle. I also saved an assortment of smallish boxes: it’s pretty common for me to need a smallish box for something. I recycled ALL the rest.

Then I made a very ugly but fully functional box out of cardboard from a larger box, because in that whole pile there was not one single box the right size or even close.

I have a jade plant, which I grew from a surreptitiously-snapped piece of the nice big jade plant at the vet’s office. Jades are some of the easiest plants to propagate (i.e., make more of): they snap cleanly and root easily, and all you need to grow one is a V-shaped 2-leaf snippet—or 4-leaf is ideal, because that gives you some stem to work with after you snap off the bottom two leaves. Stick it in a pot of dirt and it will grow. (Or you can even root a single leaf, but it won’t grow more than that: the roots come from the snapped-off place, but the new growth comes only from the crook of the V. You will have a one-leaf houseplant. Nice for small apartments.)

(Note the neat leaf-growth pattern: two leaves,
then two leaves from that V, perpendicular to the first two leaves.
Then two more leaves from the new V,
perpendicular again so that they line up with the first two.
Two this way, then two that way, back and forth.)

In fact, they are so hardy and easy to propagate, I have a story to demonstrate: the same surreptitious piece I took from the vet’s office, I dropped into my purse all casual-like and forgot about it until hours and hours later, or maybe it was the next day (I hope it was the next day, because that makes a better story—but it was definitely WAY LATER), because that was the day I found out our cat George was dying so I was preoccupied and moony and not rememberful of pieces of sneakily-snapped jade dropped sneakily into purses. When I remembered it, it had been in my purse for hours and hours (or maybe a day!) and was wilted and dry looking—but I put it in soil anyway, and it rooted anyway. Good propagators, are jades, as I say.

You have to be careful where you snip, though, because the plant you snip from won’t grow anymore at that spot. Or so I learned in plant biology, though now that seems suspicious to me: why wouldn’t they? What I remember is that a scab forms over the wound, and the new growth can’t break through it, but I might have made that up and/or emotionally imagined it. But anyway, I always choose an inconspicuous spot—or ideally, a spot where I’d like the jade to stop growing anyway. The best is when a jade puts out a new two-leaf sprout from the V of a single leaf and the stem of that leaf: that little piece can be removed without breaking a back-and-forth branch.

Another thing I learned in plant biology is that plants grown in a breeze will be stronger than plants grown in still air: they grow stronger to keep from tipping over, which can make for some good analogies if you are in the mood for it. Wind resistance is important to consider when raising baby plants in greenhouses or indoors: if they’re food or otherwise staying indoors their whole lives, it doesn’t matter if they can’t stand up to a breeze; but if they’re trees or later-season plants or whatever and your goal is to transplant them into non-greenhouse air, they need to get used to air motion or else they’ll fall flat the first time you put them in it. You can toughen the plants up ahead of time with a rotating fan. Start it pretty far away, then move it closer as the plant gets used to it.

I didn’t think of that with my jade plant, and it’s okay because it can’t live outdoors in this region anyway. But when it leaned a bit, early on, I propped it up with a bamboo skewer. Today the skewer must have shifted, and without it, the plant fell. It was bent completely over. It can’t stand up without the skewer now, and it’s too late to strengthen it “as it grows,” because it already grew that part. And it’s getting too heavy for the skewer.

Jades are often weak: I see them in offices, propped with skewers, or grown several to a pot so they can prop each other up. It might not have strengthened, even if I hadn’t propped it. The leaves are heavy, and this isn’t where they grow naturally.

Mine needs a new pot, too. Another vaguely-remembered plant biology detail: a rule of thumb about plants needed as much room below the soil as above it. Or was that trees, and that their roots go as wide as the tree is tall? Well anyway, it needs a new pot.