Learning to feed the naked and clothe the hungry...wait, that's not right...

Despite what the January 13th comic strip "Luanne" (scroll down a bit when you get there to see the comic) said about plain girls hanging out in libraries, only the majority of us are plain.
I think we all try to be pretty, and sometimes we even reach the ravishingly beautiful mark.
When we feel up to it.

Yesterday I spent the day with all the librarians in our college district, wearing my nifty new grey hat (the air conditioning inside was brutal...a pant suit, cashmere sweater and scarf, still cold WITH felt hat! )

How thrilled I was to find myself in the company of another hat wearing librarian! Doesn't she look fabulous?

I attended a training session about RSS feed.

Most bloggers have it, use it and have yet no idea what it is.

Re: RSS: I'm overwhelmed, my hat wearing buddy chirped up with "Cool!"

In brief, you can sign up via RSS magic to be notified whenever there is new material in any newspaper, blog, list serv, etc etc that interest you.
For the information professional (OK, information junkie...) this is useful.
No more clicking through X number of blogs a day to see if anyone posted anything new.

I know I can do this, set up a RSS site for my favorite stuff that is, but my "set in my ways" self says it would prefer to just click and check my favorite blogs, websites and newspapers to see if anything new has been added.
Sigh.
This "set in my ways" thing crept up on me.
Suddenly I see the 20-something implementing tools and ideas while I am still looking skeptically and/or aghast.

In the above picture "I. Literate" is short for Information Literate.
As in able to get and use information.
This is an issue for someone who doesn't do well academically, and is either afraid or disinterested in learning in an academic setting.
It also is an issue for some of our elderly, although that wasn't discussed.

I had to laugh as one speaker talked about how students have to be interested in information in order to take it in.

As an example, she mentioned how much her sixteen year old son struggled to get through reading "Little Women."

He just did not care about Meg's lost glove.
Imagine that.

I say, her son should have been required to read "Brothers Karamazov", like I had to when I was sixteen.
That woulda shut him up.
My brain still has bleeds from the Brothers K. experience.

But it is true about interest.

Ask me to read materials that use football analogy, and oops, there goes my interest.

I'm not comfortable with the idea of teaching using only subjects of interest to the individual. I've got some thinking to do on that.
Tough topic. Lots to consider, lots to talk about.

Back to my closet...

I discovered that weeding clothes makes memories bloom.

I flashed back to when I wore an item, and why.

I remembered how during my young (and broke) mothering years, a group of us from church all had cranked out a few babies.
We all discovered that we now had hips, breasts and different body dimensions in general.

We cleared out our closets, then brought the discards to church, where we all swapped clothes and donated the rest.
It was such a delight to see a friend looking good in something that hadn't looked good anymore on me.
Today I have a friend who is a business woman.
She lives in a different state.
Twice a year she and her other high income friends clean out their closets, bring the clothes to someone's home where a meal is served, and everyone can pick through the clothes and grab items for themselves.
They have a girl time blast, and then the rest of the clothes are donated to a local woman's shelter.

It's so easy to do it that way.
Right now I am stumped.
Should I donate to the women's shelter, to the humane society thrift shop, send them overseas to Israel as part of the Joseph Storehouse project, consign, or eBay?

I'm giving myself 48 hours to decide.

While I was working, another memory came to me, about when Houston was clobbered by Tropical Storm Allison and New Orleans was hit with Hurricane Katrina.
The call went out for donations to clothe those who had lost their homes.
Houston women responded like champs.
MOUNTAINS of clothes overwhelmed donation centers as closets were righteously cleaned out.

The downside was hearing the donation coordinators trying to explain that people whose homes were destroyed and who were now living on cots in gymnasiums had extremely limited needs for old prom dresses and high heeled strappy sandals.

What? No Barbie Dream Evacuee Center wardrobe?
Oh come on...wouldn't this be the perfect time to slip into a fully sequined hot pink strapless gown while you stood in line for food and argued with your insurance claims adjuster?
Of course it would.
Some people have no sense of fun.

Update on that thought: Later the teens whose schools were ruined were able to get those fancy gowns to wear to their make-up proms.
See? All things have a way of working themselves out.

Anyway, back to my closet.
I discarded over a hundred items.

Weirdly, my closet doesn't look that much more empty.

I had another memory about donated clothes.

A friend's family had a beach cottage in Santa Cruz CA.

Her mom and her aunts would always do a get-away together each summer.
They would pack bras, panties, sleep shirt and swim suit.
When they arrived, they would go to the local thrift shop where clothes sold by weight, like 10 cents a pound.
Each of the women would buy clothes to wear while they goofed off and hung out together.
At the end of their time together they would donate the clothes back to the shop.

I went to that beach cottage with my friend once and we did that too.
I bought a week's wardrobe for something like a dollar seventy five.
It really was fun, and made the vacation even more relaxing.
No "what to pack, what will I wear, what if we go out to do..." worries.
With spare change jingling in our pockets, we bought whatever we needed, when we needed it.

What the heck, who was going to see us anyway?

Tiggie stayed with me the whole time I was weeding my closet.

As usual, he found the perfect backdrop to observe all the fuss.


He tried on a few items, but decided nothing really worked for him.

He's a "one look" kind of guy.

You know, the kind of guy with such a great sense of style, he never needs to update his wardrobe.

He's a classic, through and through.