Blogging Every Day Is Hard

I don't have any knitting content today.  I was gonna do a book review, but I had a busy day, and it's 11pm, so I don't have the energy or time to do justice to a review.

What was I up to all day?  I volunteer at my local food bank, the South Corvallis Food Bank.  We get our big deliveries on alternate Thursdays.  We've been serving a lot more clients lately - for several years we'd averaged 200 to 220 households a month (roughly 800 people).  But the last few months we've been running more like 250 to 270 households a month (over 1000 people).  So we've been going thru a lot more food and our orders have been bigger.  

I think a lot of food banks around the country are experiencing this uptick in demand, so I encourage you to donate to your local food bank.  Google food banks in your area and see if they have a list of items they particularly need, or better yet send them a check.  Most food banks can get considerably more for the money than you can at the grocery store.  Just one example I picked off today's invoice, we got cases of 24 15oz cans of mixed fruit for $7.97 - that's only $0.33 per can.

When we order too much, like today, they can't bring it to us in one trip.  So today 6441 pounds of dry goods came at 11am and another 2006 pounds of freezer and refrigerator goods came at 2pm.  So I spent a lot of the day at the food bank meeting the delivery truck and supervising the volunteers unloading the pallets.  The freezer goods were a real challenge.  We stuffed all the freezers full to the brim (3 upright freezers the size of normal kitchen refrigerators and a triple freezer the size of 3 regular refrigerators for backstock).  It was a real jigsaw puzzle getting all those boxes in the freezers.  But we did it and now the food bank is well stocked.

I should still have had plenty of time to do a knitting book review this evening, you say.  Nope.  I got my arm twisted into volunteering at my local Democratic Party's holiday gathering this evening.  There was a catered dinner, a silent auction, door prizes and music.  It was fun visiting with some people I hadn't seen in a while, and I bought my Christmas tree there.  The tree farm I've gotten my tree from the last couple years, Donovan's, had donated a tree to the silent auction and I got it for just $16.  I think this weekend I'll head out there with my certificate and pick the perfect tree.

So that was my day, not a lot of time for knitting, tho I did make some progress on my Xmas tree skirt.  It's coming along nicely and should be done either tomorrow or Saturday.