Charity Work

 

For about as long as we've been married, we've given a portion of our earnings to charity. It isn't 10% by any means but in an effort to reach that 10% milestone, I donate a good chunk of time to several charities around town. So that is my excuse as to why I haven't been able to work on my tool cabinet in the last week.

First, I spent several days giving away Tootsie Rolls for donations around our small town. Despite being somewhere around 20th in size of population for our state, our organization regularly places in the top three for this particular organization for funds raised. We usually end up raising somewhere around $13,000 to give to several organizations in our county that deal with children that have either physical handicaps or are mentally challenged in some way. We all divide up and take shifts standing in front of major retail stores in our town holding a bucket for money and giving away Tootsie Rolls. When not pan handling, I'm helping to count, sort and bundle all that money. Just for reference, $13,000 in small bills equals about 3/4ths of a 5-gallon bucket tightly packed along with around 1/4th of another 5-gallon bucket in loose change. As one might expect, we have to make an appointment with the bank to deposit it all so we can write checks for 100% of everything we raise to be given out.

For the second charity, they sell donated used books to the general public raise money for the local library. All funds we raise go to the library to be used to purchase new materials or make improvements. For the last month, at least one or twice a week, I've been going downtown to our local Civic Center where we carry up all the donated books people dropped off into the conveniently located shopping carts inside the entrance, upstairs to this area where we sort them by genre and place them in boxes in piles by genre. This year we ended up with 996 boxes which if I conservatively say weight 35 pounds each, comes up to around 17.5 tons of books!

This week however, donations cease and we carry all 17.5 tons of books downstairs and arrange them on tables to be sold for $2 per hardcover and $1 per paperback. I'm not positive on how much they raise each time we do this but I think it is somewhere close to $20,000. My job today and tomorrow anyway are to move all 17.5 tons of books downstairs using small dollies to move around 11 or 12 boxes at a time. Fortunately there is an elevator that makes it easier though I am still required to lift each box onto the dolly upstairs and place it on a table to be unpacked downstairs. I got about half the boxes done when I took the photo above and called it a day. Tomorrow I shall do the rest of the boxes after some Advil and a good night's rest. Below is the venue and the beginning of setup. You can see books lining both walls (romance on the left bleachers and novels on the right wall) and workers setting up more tables in the empty spaces. By the end of the week, this entire hall will be full of tables and books awaiting the start of the sale on Friday which will run through Sunday. On Monday, what is left will be heavily culled and I will haul the ones that make the cull back upstairs on the dolly for the next time we hold the sale sometime next spring. More Advil, more resting needed, rinse and repeat.

I snuck in the following day when we had most of the books unpacked just to take another photograph seen below. I'll be working the cashier's till for the next three days so likely will not have the time to take another one.