Local food banks/pantries

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Originally Posted by Tybee

Tradd, add me to the people who donated, thank you for the heads up! See it's headquartered in Geneva, where we used to go to church.

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Thank you!

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Originally Posted by Tybee

We actually have a wood bank here, for firewood. I am encouraging my husband to go volunteer to cut wood with his chain saw. They are getting a splitter at cost from the hardware store. It just started up within the last year or so.
He just bought his third chainsaw (two need repair, and we decided to get a new one and repair the others, since they both broke after he just felled about ten trees in our meadow and he has to clean it up now) and I guess it would be like tithing on the new saw!

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Wood bank - what a great idea!

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Originally Posted by rosarugosa

There was a food drive here on Saturday. I was able to put together a nice bag to donate by shopping our storage shelves in the cellar. It made me think about how we have a life of such abundance that we can do this and not even feel an impact.

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I’m going to go through my cabinets again this week. I still have plenty I can donate.

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Originally Posted by Tradd

Wood bank - what a great idea!

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This is one of the activities our local Order Of Odd Fellows engages in. They will come in, and turned downed trees into firewood, which they will then distribute to people here in need.

Is smoke pollution not a problem where many of you are burning wood?

when pH fell our little force of scrub trees, he put the wood out by the street and one neighbor took much of it, and the rest of it disappeared from the “free wood” sign.

we have a gas fireplace which I love, converted from wood-burning

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Originally Posted by iris lilies

Is smoke pollution not a problem where many of you are burning wood?

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From wood stoves, not especially hereabouts. Low population density, daily ocean breezes to clear the smoke over to Hawaii or Canada. Sometimes in certain weather conditions my neighbor’s smoke doesn’t get very far above her inadequate chimney, and it then flows over to my place, which can be irritating, but it’s a low-frequency event. More frequent when she burns damp wood and keeps the fire temperature too low.

Now, during wildfire season, depending on the winds, we can have horrid smoke problems in the air due to Canadian wildfires in BC, and sometimes from the US.

Back to IL and her housing expense. I know you don't pay rent or have a mortgage payment. There are other costs associated with housing, though. Could you factor in homeowners insurance and property taxes? Here in Florida it would be +/- $500 - $1000 or more a month.

Just threw a donation at the Northern IL Food Bank. That’s outside of Cook County. I’ve also been donating to a local food pantry in my town.

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Originally Posted by iris lilies

…we have a gas fireplace which I love, converted from wood-burning

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I did that a few years ago for both my parents’ homes here, as they were getting too old to drag in firewood through the snow, and I wanted them to have reliable backup heating for their homes during out winter power outages here. They love it.

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Originally Posted by lmerullo

Back to IL and her housing expense. I know you don't pay rent or have a mortgage payment. There are other costs associated with housing, though. Could you factor in homeowners insurance and property taxes? Here in Florida it would be +/- $500 - $1000 or more a month.

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I’m going by what ChatGPT tells me the government counts as “housing costs “ for purposes of collecting food benefits. So for that, property taxes and insurance doesn’t count, at least according to ChatGPT.

edited ad: sorry, I was wrong, I CAN count additional housing costs as well as medical costs, but even when I throw those in, I still wouldn’t qualify for SNAP benefits in my state of Missouri.

So on an income of $30000 a year with no mortgage, I wouldn’t get government assistance.

And I’m fine with that because if I lived in a smaller property, I would be fine on that in this income. The house where I live now is too big for one person and also it has a giant lot that I would have to pay someone to maintain if I didn’t have DH around.