Reactivating Skype Credit - A Micro-Victory

 It's not winning the World Cup, but I am quite pleased to report I reactivated my expired skype credit.  You may know that skype is a great way to make free calls from your computer to anywhere in the world, to someone who also has skype software downloaded.  (It's free.)  If you want to "skype-out", and call a landline or cell phone #, you can do it from your computer for a modest purchase of Skype credit.
For several months Skype emailed me my credit was about to expire, but since I didn't have anyone at the time who I needed to call, I just ignored it.  Turns out that to prevent your credit from expiring, all you need to do is make a call - anywhere - even for one second. The remaining credit was $7.72.  My daughter is abroad and now it would be perfect - I can send a text message to her cell.  Before biting the bullet and purchasing more Skype credit - which I may never actually use - I googled "reactivate skype credit."  Sure enough, all you need to do is go to your account and press a button -
5.3 Inactive Skype Credit: If you do not use your Skype Credit for a period of 180 days, we will place your Skype Credit on inactive status. You can reactivate the Skype Credit by following the reactivation link in My Account at http://www.skype.com/go/store.reactivate.credit. (I haven't hyperlinked it because it's going to MY account, which will likely not help you much.) Reactivated Skype Credit is not refundable.
This from my inbox:

Your full Skype Credit balance $7.72 is now active and ready for you to use. Your account details: Balance: $7.72

Talk soon, The people at Skype

Cooking Coops featured in the NYTimes

Cooking Coops, groups of people who swap meals, have been around for awhile - they're wonderful ways to eat better quality food while building social capital.  You can read a lot of details about how they work in this article about them.  This describes four families swapping meals, each cooking a large quantity to feed 8 adults. That way you're covered for 3 nights in addition to your own.
It requires people with fairly compatible tastes and diets, who actually like to cook.  Not so easy to pull off, but worth trying, for sure.
In our crunchy community here in Mt. Airy, four households I know have a different version of this, Soup Group.  They meet once a week; the host family provides a seasonally appropriate soup + bread + salad, a nice casual peasant-style meal.  They now all have children, so the four families have become de facto extended family for one another.  Don't know if baby boomers, with all our travels and dietary restrictions, are on board with this.  Seems like more of a 30's phenomenon, when people settle in with mates and children.
Here is a book mentioned in the article, Dinner at Your Door.

Dill Seeds for Triscuiteers

Growing Vegetables At Home With Triscuit

My husband, a loyal Triscuiteer, pointed out a very cool feature of the low-fat Triscuit box - dill seeds embedded as a premium.  Better than coupons, action figures, or high-sugar latte packets, for sure!  Triscuits has teamed up with UrbanFarming to disseminate over four million products with seeds, and is providing lots of useful and fun information on growing your own food.  What was previously called gardening has been rebranded as "homefarming" - but whatever.  It's a neat thing, and their site is full of accessible videos and even a forum for people to share their information. Hope my dill seeds germinate.  To date, I have been a complete failure at homefarming, since my yard was full of shade trees.  The new yard is sunny, so I'm into it.
You can read more about the Nabisco/Triscuit partnership with Urban Farming.  Not clear to me if the $$$ are marketing/promotional or from some Nabisco philanthropy?  In any event, this public/private collaboration can spawn a lot of positive energy, so hats off to Triscuit, and also to UF for pulling off this massive project!

Chunky Berry Soup

This is a luscious summer soup, probably our favorite.  I found the recipe in the Inqy.  Eventually I realized that the strawberries were from Watsonville, CA and discovered that the PA strawberry season is short and precedes the blueberry season.  Now I watch for the strawberries very closely, and with luck, like this year - you can snag strawberries at their end and blueberries at their beginning.

A perfect alternative is to substitute about 3 or 4 peeled, sliced ripe peaches.  You get the same texture and the same spectacular color, and the peach and blueberry season are in tandem here in the mid-Atlantic. I often double this recipe, since leftovers are so good.  It's important to make it early enough so that it can chill for 5-6 hours.

1 pint blueberries, washed and drained

1 pint strawberries, hulled and halved or quartered, if they're large

1 c. white grape juice

1/4 c. lemon juice

1/3 c. water

1 T + 2 t cornstarch

1/4 to 1/2 sugar

Place blueberries, strawberries, grape juice and lemon juice into a medium sauce pan, cover.  Bring to a brisk boil over high heat.  With a gas oven top, that takes awhile; with our new electric stove, it's really fast.  The only thing that takes any real time in this recipe is slicing the strawberries.

Remove from heat. In a measuring cup, mix the water and cornstarch into a smooth paste and stir it into the berry mixture. Return to heat, and quickly bring to a boil, stirring constantly.  This is the neat part - stir for one minute, and the liquid thickens and glistens.  Sweeten to taste with sugar.

Chill thoroughly - for at least 5 to 6 hours. The color deepens. 

Garnish with chopped fresh mint, sliced fresh fruit.  This is a deep, gorgeous color so serve it in bowls which will show that off!  It is refreshing, beautiful, and the lemon juice gives it a lovely tartness which tingles a bit on the tongue.  MMMMM.  But it's pretty sweet, as well - my niece Tasha dubbed it Fruit Roll Up Soup.

The Late, Lamented Molly Marx

Go Sally!

Love, your sister! Congrats on being picked up by the Target Book Club!

Catalog Choice Offers Credit Card Opt-Out & More

This just arrived in my Inbox. I love Catalog Choice - I've used it for several years and it maintains a data base of all the catalogs I've opted out of, along with all the different names and spellings. We receive just a handful of unsolicited catalogs, and buy online all the time. I'm sure without having used their monitoring services, we'd be overrun!

I followed their link to get rid of those @#$#$%%^%^& credit card offers, especially for my 22 year old. Very easy. I've pasted in their message - the right side may be cut off in your browser but the click buttons do work, which is the main point.

Beyond Catalogs, More Choice June 2010

Hi betsy teutsch, While catalogs are thick and glossy, they only account for 15% of your standard mail. On average, you get 900 pieces of unsolicited mail per year. There is lots of mail that goes straight from the mailbox to the garbage can or the recycling bin. The time has come to stop more of your unwanted mail. Based on member suggestions, we are adding thousands of new titles covering categories such as phonebooks, pre-approved credit card offers, coupons, letter size direct mail and other unsolicited marketing offers.

Opt-out of unwanted mail to do your part to reduce waste and clutter today. Your non-profit partner, Catalog Choice Team Get your friends involved too. Forward this email or use our invite-a-friend tool.

Wedding Registries: Reclaimed and Reframed

Two years ago I wrote a column about my love-hate relationship with wedding registries – appreciating their efficiency and loathing their impersonal, overly directive tone. Here I am two years later, based on recent developments, happily updating my report. Our son Zach just married the lovely Becca, and I have had a ringside seat in their gifting experience. New options for registering work beautifully, giving the couple an opportunity to express more than just a catalogue of items, while still allowing guests to enjoy the ease of a registry.

Wedding guests have been trained to demand wedding registries. They are convenient; gifters are assured they are sending something the couple actually wants, end of story. Brides and grooms are therefore conditioned to provide registries, even if they don’t need or want much of anything. Newly married couples who have been through the experience advise that it’s smarter to proactively choose things than be passive and see what comes. Guests seem to divide on the question of giving items versus money. If you’re a cash giver (more common in some ethnic groups than others), just skip this column. No brides and grooms ever dislike cash – it’s always the right size, right color, and right design.

For the rest of us gifters who like to pick an item for the couple, the simplicity of a registry is appealing. Their downside, which I emphasized back in 2008, is that they can come across as cold and greedy. Since then I have learned wedding industrial complex marketing strategies. Stores provide brides and grooms with all kinds of premiums and incentives and then send the couple through the store with a laser gun to literally zap any item they like. The laser gun zapper technique is the favorite part of the whole experience for some of the grooms who do not enjoy any of the rest of the wedding planning. I was told that one big box store has created a 3:1 “formula” for gifts to guests, though I can’t document this absurdity. The result is an endless list of completely unprioritized gifts, without any commentary or way of knowing anything about the bride and groom other than their taste in pots, pans and sheets – generally way more luxurious than the ones we’ve all been using since in the 70’s.

Zach and Becca used alternativegiftregistry.org’s smart, clever registry which allowed them to manage the process, instead of being controlled by big box stores. They wrote a bit about their thinking about gifts, building on their friends Ethan and Joelle’s manifesto:

You'll see that some of these gifts won't come in boxes. It would be a gift to us if you:

* gave a donation to one of the organizations [which were listed] or

* helped us with a few household items or

* did something creative we haven't thought of yet or

* any combination of the above!

But needless to say, this is a celebration of love, not stuff. The greatest gift is your presence in our lives and at our celebration!

That said, people do like giving gifts. One great feature of this type of registry is that the brides/grooms can pick the items and link them to the internet site which will be the best provider; it’s not managed by any particular store. They also put up suggested items without links. My personal favorite was their request for a knife sharpener. “We hear it’s important to have a good sharpener for our knives. We don’t know a thing about what’s a good one, but will trust your judgment on this matter if you know something about it and want to give us one.” In one case they posted a 12”skillet, along with a strange fact – on Amazon, the skillet cost LESS with a top than the same skillet without the top. It makes sense that the bride and groom would be better informed than gifters, since they are the ones doing the research. A flexible registry allows everyone to take advantage of better deals, and shop where they like. If a couple likes handmade things from artists or craftsmen without web capacity, they can include a link to Etsy (a portal for handmade things), another way to personalize an Alternative Registry.

Another nice feature of the Alternative Gift Registry is that as soon as a gift is spoken for, Team Bride & Groom takes it off the list. Hence those who visit are greeted with a half dozen or so suggested gifts, not hundreds, many of which are listed as already “taken.” It requires that the brides and grooms stay on top of it, but it works very well. Couples can be open-ended – listing their chosen stainless pattern but not how many place settings, for example. Zach and Becca included items which were very small and a few high-end ones. This is how they’ve acquired a Kindle and a very cool under-the-counter NatureMill composter. It doesn’t hurt to ask!

What about gift certificates, not quite money but not quite an item? They included a list of stores where they frequently shop, some quite near to where they live. Many people were happy to send them shopping cards to those stores. They can combine all those gifts and get larger items, so it seems like a win/win. Gifters aren’t spending a lot of money on wasteful, needless shipping. Stores like gift certificates so much they ship them for free; why not, since they get all the cash up front?One store, Powell’s Book Store in Portland, OR, carries a huge inventory of used books which can all ship in one order. Hey, Philadelphians, did you know you can buy and give a Weavers Way Gift Card? One piece of advice: keep careful track of all the serial numbers on the gift cards, in case they are lost or stolen.

Some people found their Alternative Gift Registry a little mysterious, since it required following unfamiliar instructions. In these cases, folks simply went to stores they like and sent whatever they wanted. That’s precisely what a lot of people do anyway. Alternative Registries can be used for any occasion such as birthday, graduation, birth or Bar Mitzvah.

image from www.OccupationGifts.com