Please, stop sending me *direct letters* asking me to send money to your favorite charities. I am not speaking of the public requests, and I am not speaking of those charities which we have a history of giving to. I am speaking about letters sent directly to me from parties other than the charities themselves, most of which are asking us to give to charities which we do not have a history of giving donations. I have begun getting a pile of direct mails from some ferret people requesting donations to all sorts of ferret things and sometimes more. Why, I don't know. If I had the money to give I already would be doing so. Since we have been feeling bad enough over the last four years about our changed circumstances which make it impossible to even give to some of our favorite charities that we once gave to generously it is painful when people remind us by asking us also give to others. Let me be frank here, the Labs had a generous pension system when Steve joined it which was because members usually were not permitted to publish outside the Labs (a rule that cuts down on employment opportunities except when someone else who is originally from the same company knows the person's work), so we should have been fine despite the Labs going away since Steve was with them for 20 years and because we also have been doing without to save on our own for our future. But you know the pension regulations changes that happened during the Reagan and Bush 1 administration years -- the same ones that lost Enron workers their pensions by letting companies reinvest them, and another which allowed a company hold back part of the pension and then the purchasing company to get to keep it if the original company sold, and another which allows medical insurance to be stopped despite the original contract, oh, and the one that has the medical insurance purchased from the pension money the company holds back? Well, the first one took away 2/3 of our pension, and we will be hit by the middle 2 at points during 2006. The final one has applied for 4 years now but next year, well, see the middle two... Thank goodness we were never as badly hit as those with a number of other companies, and thank goodness we are younger than many of them. A friend's father worked 35 years for a company that was bought by Enron a year (?) or a few years (?) before Enron folded. Jim's dad lost his entire pension -- all of it -- because of those same changes in pension regulations that have hurt us. That is truly terrible, especially at his age. Instead of taking your time to mail me to ask for money that we can't give could you, please, either do something of your own labor to directly help that charity which is dear to you, and help your own future by working to once again make pensions safe for people in the U.S.? People are just starting to get a feeling for what those changes mean to U.S. workers by seeing what they do to others like us so you may as well work to change them back to the way they were before those two presidencies to protect yourself. Don't worry about us. We are okay because we have always lived modestly for the most part and saved (with a few rare splurges for spice in life -- since even moderation needs moderation to not be obsession), but we have a heck of a lot more saving to do to get back to where we would have been by now if it wasn't for pension regulation changes and will be having to work for a great many years more than we had planned. So we have no choice except to be tight with a penny because when a chunk of money that large which had been part of what was supposed to exist as reimbursement for long, hard work disappears like that a huge number of things in life change. We can no longer give very large amounts to charities, just some to few core ones of our own choosing. As a result, please, stop writing to us to ask us to donate to all of your favorite charities. Your mails on that score are not welcome here nor useful to anyone when sent here. Since they obviously mean a great deal to you I hope that you find a way to directly help them more yourself. It can be done; I provide labor pretty much every day changing things for the better with the IFC, and working through the FHL and when time allows also the FML to help those with ferret health questions so those are other ways to give to the ferret community when the usual route isn't feasible. There are a lot of ways to help others beyond causing great discomfort by asking people to give away money they don't have. -- Sukie (not a vet) Ferret Health List co-moderator http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/ferrethealth FHL Archives fan http://ferrethealth.org/archive/ replacing http://fhl.sonic-weasel.org International Ferret Congress advisor http://www.ferretcongress.org [Posted in FML issue 5077]