Tugster Sells Merch 2

Here was last year’s post by this title.

My 2020 calendars are ready and can be mailed out as early as this Monday.  To order, send me your USPS mailing address by email (parrotlect at gmail dot com    , you know what I mean) and pay by paypal to that email address, or check made out to Will Van Dorp.  Calendars are $15 each.

When I started the calendar idea,  I’d not considered needing a cover photo, so it was proposed that I chose the Sea Scouts and Sea Dart II, thinking that organization would be one to mention as a possible group to support.  This is a break-even enterprise for me, but if you want to pay more, make a donation to the local Sea Scouts, whose Ship 228 I chose for the cover.  Contact them here.

Here are some photos from the Sea Scout group doing chart training and

hand saluting.

So the calendar . . . here are some ..

sample pages.

Your votes guided my choices.  In one case, I had to switch an image (the April shot of a container ship under the VZ Bridge) to make the photo fit.  In a few cases, no proposed image had a majority, so I included more than one image.

In a few cases, I added some related images.  I hope you will be happy with the result.

As to the actual calendar-making process, it was eye-opening.  I chose VistaPrint (Waltham MA) because I was happy with work/price from them in the past.  Vistaprint is owned by Cimpress, an Irish company that was founded in France.  When I completed the assembly process and sent the credit card number, I got a receipt saying it was sold by Vistaprint in Venlo, Netherlands.  When the box of calendars arrived, the shipping label stated “Printed in Canada” but was shipped from Reno NV.  Mind boggling! This is the global supply chain involved in creating a calendar for a guy in NYC who is handling “order-fulfillment” himself to cut out [the additional] the intermediaries.

It reminds me of a William Langewiesche article I read years ago, which starts out with him telling of flying an air cargo jet over the Himalayas carrying air pallets of Chicago telephone books, back when there were still paper telephone books.  It also reminds me of learning that my MMD-related urine sample was jet FedEx’d to a federally-approved facility in the Midwest;  now I can’t look at a FedEx jet flying overhead and wondering what manner of biosamples it may be transporting.

I printed only 50, so get your calendar ASAP.  My plan for Monday is to carrying a bunch down to the post office.  To repeat, if you want one, email me your address.  Paypal to my email address is an option;  if you want to send a check, email me and I’ll get you my mailing address.  Pieces-of-eight are fine; cryptocurrency is not, nor are sand dollars.

Enjoy one of the shortest days of the year, and the first winter sunrise in the sixth boro is not until 0715 on December 22.