(no subject)

[cleolinda]

Still pretty logy; trying to keep sore throat from turning into a cough, but I am on antibiotics now. Holla.

Thanks so much for the disaster relief comments--the most efficient, most trustworthy way to help seems to be to donating to the Red Cross. You can specify what area you want your donation to go to, and the one-click link at Amazon (super easy) specifies the Asian earthquake/tsunami victims. I'm going to keep linking to the Red Cross until... I don't even know when.

How's the bottled water campaign coming? Anyone?

By the way--beware of disaster relief scams.

(Phantom is currently leading over Snicket with something like 12 votes. Still have not seen the movie. Am tempted to try writing a Phantom 15M just from the stills. "Oh, Raoul, no one must see the ring you gave me! I KNOW! I'll hide it in my cleavage--no one EVER looks there!")

Meanwhile, The Lovely Emily is leaving town tomorrow--but not back to school; she's spending New Year's in New Orleans. She has promised to go back to Flying Joe's Burrito or whatever the name was and try to FedEx me some of the salsa, or steal the recipe, or something. Meanwhile, my New Year's Eve plans involve 1) deadlines and 2) booze. Friends don't let friends type drunk, yo.

But before she leaves, we went and had lunch today at Panera Bread. I got the Smokehouse Turkey Panini, which is apparently comprised of "smoked turkey breast, smoked bacon, smoked cheddar and a sun-dried tomato ale mustard, all grilled hot on [their] Artisan Three Cheese bread." "Artisan bread" sounds kind of pretentious; all I know is that the sandwich was good. (Incidentally, wayyyy back in the day I submitted my journal to some journal-reviewing community and they rejected me pretty roundly. One of the criticisms is that I was writing, at the time, too much about food. I say fuck 'em. In the nicest way, of course.) Then we exchanged a few things of Em's at the Gap and came back to my house and ripped a rip of her rip of Poe's Haunted CD and I had threeeeeee Mountain Dews wheeeeeeeeee. Mostly, I feel better for having gotten out of the house.

Sigh. Back to work.

ETA: I would be checking ill-tempered sea bass in the area, myself.






Saving lives is love.
Donate to the Red Cross: US, UK, Int.
Donate to another organization

Comments

[all-ephemera.livejournal.com]

Doctors Without Frontiers is another excellent place to donate to - they have a scrupulous record and they're on the front of disasters - no matter where or who - within days.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's right. Actually, I think I got a Christmas card from my agency saying they were donating to Doctors Without Borders in lieu of, I dunno, sending us fruit baskets or something. I need to find a donation link for them.

[theatre-angel.livejournal.com]

Oh, good, I wasn't the only one truly fascinated and appalled by Emmy's cleavage. ^^;

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Well, take your icon, for example. "I'm going to my father's grave. Which black dress has the lowest neck?" DADDY ISSUES AHOY.

[incendialis.livejournal.com]

::cough- lets try this for the third time::

I was gonna say Panera Bread rox, but now it seems kinda silly after what all_ephemera wrote... Then I saw the cleavage post, and thought, go ahead. Not that cleavage makes me think of bread...

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll repost mine here then: Hey, you're no worse than me in the actual entry. "Donate to the Red Cross, because people are dying and starving! P.S. We have tons of fancy food here, and it is AWESOME." ; )

[all-ephemera.livejournal.com]

Heh heh, not to worry. I'm on a tear about Medecins Sans Frontieres right now, but I will say that OMG Panera Bread is amazing and I love it and now I want a Tuscan Chicken sandwich in a bad, bad way.

[sapphires13.livejournal.com]

Who're you trying to kid? Cleavage makes us all think of bread.
..
...Or maybe that's just me...

I could probably throw a joke in here about carbohydrates or the Atkins diet and cleavage, but I don't have the energy.

Much icon love, Cleo. Gotta love the evil green faerie (I went through quite an obsession with her a couple of years ago)

[ter369.livejournal.com]

Friends don't let friends type drunk, yo.

I'll be offering "Ter's First Annual LJ New Year's Eve Sobriety Test" throughout the evening of the 31st.

So drop on by. At least for the higher math part.

::kidding about the math::

[incendialis.livejournal.com]

Typing drunk using Word is amusing. You're seeing all these red squiggles, and for the life of you, you can't figure out why...

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Oh, you know I can't math sober, much less smashed off my ass.

(I will totally be there.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_waterlilies/]

*boggles* You still haven't seen it?

(Oh, yeah, and because you brought up m15m and in case your squishy mentioned it to you: you're cool with that icon, right? Because I honestly don't want you to think that I'm trying to rip you off. pleasedon'tbemadatmeIdidn'tmeananythingbyitIswearyouarethequeenofparody!)

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Icon? No, I'm always fine with icons. : )

I still haven't seen the movie because we were going to make it a whole family thing, but then my stepfather kept not being able to go, and NOW my mother's talking about going without him, and it's pissing me off because if we were just gonna go without him, we could have done that LAST WEEK GAH.

[janegraddell.livejournal.com]

By the way--beware of disaster relief scams.

It's a sad commentary on, well, life, that I find myself at this moment doing some investigation about whether there might be some scam involved in knitting teddy bears (http://www.fortunecity.com/millenium/lassie/322/).

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

I just glanced over the page, so I don't know one way or the other--anything in particular that points to scamnation?

(The name "Teddies for Tragedies" is sort of a tip-off as far as I'm concerned--it's so tacky that it kind of makes you wonder.)

[sennical.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmmm Panera Bread. Vestavia City Center?

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Where the Rave is, yeah. (I'm sort of an idiot savant when it comes to local geography, minus the "savant" part.)

[ladyortyger.livejournal.com]

That's a GREAT album. :)

[ambiguousreason.livejournal.com]

"Oh, Raoul, no one must see the ring you gave me! I KNOW! I'll hide it in my cleavage--no one EVER looks there!"

*dies laughing* Personally, I think that'd be worth writing, even if you never ever let anyone else read it. You could pull it out when life gets rough and it'd probably be good for a few laughs.

My New Year's Eve plans include... oh, wait, NOTHING. I wish they included booze, though. Sigh. And that sandwich sounds goooooood. Now I'm hungry again, dammit!

[incendialis.livejournal.com]

I've never had a Panera Bread sandwich (Their name makes me laugh... Bread Bread) I usually have bagels. ::stomach growl::

[cheapblackpens.livejournal.com]

Letter writing campaign info posted by Saturday night on my LiveJournal. It's what I'm doing in between packing up my entire life and figuring out how to house train a wild cat in a week and a half. I already posted some basic stuff about tsunami relief, but my next post will be about the letter writing campaign. I'm getting contact information for water companies and other corporations.
-Justice

[incendialis.livejournal.com]

By the way... Why on earth does the FDA control lazer and light shows? Where's the connection there?

[ladyvoldything.livejournal.com]

Pleeeeeeease do Snicket instead! Please please please! Don't pay attention to the seething masses (look at the good they've done the world so far...), go with the one you've actually seen! Or do both! But please do Snicket at some point!

[kittygopounce.livejournal.com]

Hee! I love your icon!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I used to work for the American Red Cross and I really recommend against donating to them. They are extremely inefficient. Doctors Without Borders or the International Red Cross or Direct Relief International would all be better bets. I'm donating to the last of those-- it's a local organization (from my hometown of Santa Barbara) with excellent credentials:

http://www.directrelief.org/index.html

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I may switch out my Red Cross link on the sidebar to the International variety, then. I'd never heard of Direct Relief International--awesome.

[prncssaurora.livejournal.com]

I also found some stuff about UNICEF (http://www.unicefusa.org/site/pp.asp?c=duLRI8O0H&b=25933) donating water supplies, as well as other things.

Also, am sooo excited for Phantom in 15 Minutes!

[edda.livejournal.com]

DAMMIT WHY DO WE HAVE NO PANERA HERE!?

Also no Boston Market. Please explain to me why I bother to even get out of bed. Honestly.

Quizno's is all that keeps me going sometimes, I swear.

[edda.livejournal.com]

OK, this is what I've done about the getting water donated to people thing, because I am a clueless flailing idiot and have no idea how to go about this sort of thing:

I went to the Dasani and Evian U.S. (http://www.evian.com/us/) websites, clicked "Contact Us", and filled out the little pop-up windows with more information than I'd prefer to give corporate America under better circumstances, then filled a message basically saying, "Hey, you dudes giving any freebies to the Sri Lankans and Indonesians? Or donating profits from each bottle sold? Because I'd totally get behind that, and so would all my friends. I mean, you're richer than fuck, don't you think maybe you should do something?"

Only, you know, less guilt-inducing and informal. I almost gave out my cell phone number and decided perhaps that wasn't in my best interest, charity notwithstaning.

The Aquafina people redirect you to pepsico.com (http://www.pepsico.com/company/request-information.shtml), a website that will make your soul shrivel in the howling corporate wind. However, the Board of Directors email address is apparently BoardofDirectors@Pepsi.com, so maybe that's the place to start.

I told you I was a clueless idiot. But maybe the first step is always the stupidest hardest. If anybody who reads this has any ideas, for God's sake speak up.

(Also x-posting this to my journal.)




(http://www.dasani.com/index2.html)

[sapphsmum.livejournal.com]

I wish you the best getting through to these corportions!~
I have been trying for over a year (mind you just trying to get help for my own family, but help none the less) before this whole tragedy struck on Dec 26 and I have only received one reply! One, and it said "sorry there are so many people needing help and we can't help everyone so we help NO ONE!"

I wrote back and politely told them what I felt about their policy which reminded me of my step dad's convoluted logic that if he could only afford to get shoes for one child then no one would get them because that was "fair." So if he didn't have money for 6 pairs of shoes, all went barefoot instead of at least helping one!

At least had one family gotten help from this corporation, not all would have went without, I reminded them (even if it wasn't my family that they helped)but I never receved another letter!

I keep writing to companies, politicians, celebs, etc., but I am not holding my breath! Companies for the most part, have no human compassion unless there is free PR involved.

Just look at the companies giving freebies away this year on Oprah. They do not give away products on a need basis when some John/Jane Doe writes for help,which would be the compassionate thing to do. But are more than happy to jump on the bandwagon for all the free PR on Oprah's "greatest giveaway shows." It's all about profit, and ratings on Oprah equal profit thru advertising so they will donate gifts like the cars to get the publicity.
Sad but true!

Good Luck, because these people truly need this help, and NOW! But unless there is something in it for these companies I don't see them GIVING this water away that these people desperately need right now!

Sorry to be so cynical but I have been butting my head against the corporate doors for over a year with only headaches to show for my time. It's hard to see these companies as compassionate when they won't even give you the courtesy of acknowledging your existance!

I truly hope these companies do something! It would help restore my hope that they care!
Christina

Save yourself!

[ebonlock.livejournal.com]

(Phantom is currently leading over Snicket with something like 12 votes. Still have not seen the movie. Am tempted to try writing a Phantom 15M just from the stills. "Oh, Raoul, no one must see the ring you gave me! I KNOW! I'll hide it in my cleavage--no one EVER looks there!")

Much as I would love to read your recap of Phantom, after all they do say laughter is a healing force, I really must warn you against seeing the film. Seriously. I mean if you value your hearing stay the hell away from this movie. Or you could just bring ear plugs and stick them in whenever you see Gerard start to open his mouth, that might work.