My stepfather gave me the best conceptual gift ever. The other day, I was jokingly telling him about how I’d decided to embrace my thirties by becoming “imaginary cat lady.” After all, as everyone knows, imaginary cats are much cleaner than the real ones, and you save a lot of money on food and vet bills.
I figured he just thought I was insane until he gave me the following as a Christmas present:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/spam_musubi/332514163/
Thanks Barry! You really made my Christmas. 
Comments Off
Life Dev has a link to changingthepresent.com, a social networking site that allows you to choose from a range of different charities and share your charitable activities with your friends. You can also set up registries for weddings, babies, your dearly departed, or for any other event.
Apparently, the site will also offer donation gift certificates, but not until 2007. Doh! So much for that last-minute present idea. The site says that it’s easy to give a charitable donation as a gift, so if I actually figure out how to do that, I might stop being disappointed about the missing gift certificates.
The advantage of the gift certificates; they take away the pressure of choosing the appropriate charity. Then again, perhaps that where “it’s the thought that counts” fits in.
I haven’t had a chance to fully explore the entire site, but the registry option still seems to need some work. First of all, it only allows you to create memorial registries for deaths that occurred after 2000. I decided to cheat and use an incorrect date, but once I created the registry, I had no idea what to do next.
I’ll continue fiddling around for a bit, as I think it’s a fantastic idea and would really like to expose my relatives to this approach to giving as soon as possible. However, I’ll probably have to wait until next year.