Naughty and Nice #2

You know how Santa has a list that tells him if you're naughty or nice? I like to help Santa with that little chore.

Here's another group for Santa to know about.

NAUGHTY: The condo board of our "treehouse in the Sunshine State".

There is ample parking in our lots. We never see cars that don't belong to our neighbors, so we were surprised to get a notice that the condo board decided to institute a parking pass system. I was informed that each unit would get 1 free Resident sticker and 1 Visitor sticker. This is good for Sorority Girl, who will occasionally spend the night, especially if all her housemates are elsewhere. Unfortunately, we have to pay $20 for a second Resident sticker. I had to show up at the condo office with a copy of our lease, our driver's licenses, our car registration, a lengthy questionnaire and the above-mentioned $20.

My neighbor says this is a way for the condo board to get contact info on private owners that are not paying Homeowner fees. Mr Sunshine State thinks it is just a money making scheme on the part of the board. I think it was crappy of the board to institute this system in December.

NICE: Second Harvest Food Bank and the people who volunteer for them.

40 employees in our district showed up yesterday to work at the Food Bank. I had never been there before and I was amazed to walk into the giant warehouse and see about 10,000 boxes of donated food.
Our group split into two groups. I was in the group that was checking expiration dates on all the donated food. The other group was sorting the donations into boxes by product category.

Much of the food came from Target and WalMart. They get tax breaks for donating the food before it gets to the expiration date. I was pulling boxes of food that were good until April and May. There were boxes of pizza crusts, crackers, dented cans of soup, crushed boxes of microwave popcorn and cases of water with 1 or 2 smooshed bottles.

Each pallet of boxes held about 48 boxes of food. Our group processed about 15 pallets of boxes in 3 hours.

I started thinking about where all that food was going. I will be without a job (by choice) as of Dec 16th but I was making pennies at my job and Mr Sunshine State takes pretty good care of me. There have been times in our lives when family and friends were giving us food, because we were having problems making ends meet with 2 small kids. I'll be spending the Holidays thinking about those people that rely on the Food Banks. They are having a food drive at the local TV station today. I'm off to clean out the cupboards and find some donations.

Food Bank volunteers everywhere are on today's NICE list.