We interrupt this blog for a shameless giveaway

So I've been having a bad endo week -- the kind where you get to feel nauseated, dizzy and exhausted all day and night, and you have to explain to your friends that, no, you're not pregnant; your body just decided it would be a hoot and a holler to give you all the ick symptoms of pregnancy, but no surprise package at the end.

Bitter? Who? Never.

Anyway. So since all real think-work was out of the question, as well as anything that involved movement on my part, and since I desperately needed to feel that I had some worth as a human being -- that there is in fact a mind powering this bag o' symptoms I'm dragging around (or is it dragging me?) -- I decided to catch up on something I've only been meaning to do for about six or seven months now.

I finally got it together and came up with a comparatively short version of The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List, suitable for posterness.

I also got the original Wish List in all its glory typeset and ready to be plastered on some bitter-and-proud-of-it homeschooler's wall.

The printer I go to for the magazine whipped some of these posters up as easy as pie. Easier, since I didn't have to look at a galley or proof or anything like that. I just brought in the file and hey presto! there were the posters. 11"x17". Matte paper rather than glossy.

The price, however, is harder to calculate than the mag's. For the magazine, I buy a big box of el cheapo 9x12 envelopes -- $6.99 for a hundred -- so I barely have to nod at the cost when I'm reckoning up. Printing and postage are the hefty concerns.

The posters, however, require adorable little tubes to ship. If I order enough of them at a time, they're not horribly expensive; but they're significant. I could pay for a box of the abovementioned envelopes out of my week's grocery money and barely notice the dip. The tubes, though, cost actual money.

And the postage?

Who knows? You can't just go by weight. They're a funky shape. I'll be raging about this in another blog posting very soon, but the post office (and I say this with all apologies to sane and decent employees of same) has lost its mind when it comes to how much it costs to send something somewhere. Their web site is no help at all in this situation. For all I know, it'll cost seventy-five cents to mail a poster; for all I know, it'll cost five dollars.

The only way to find out is to actually mail one. Just march right up to the counter, brandishing my mailing tube like a particularly lame light saber, and demand that it be taken away. Where? I don't care! Just take it! (And tell me how much it costs to do that, okay?)

This is patently absurd. This is why that guy wrote Catch 22. (I know it was Joseph Heller. Don't ruin my flow here.) I can't post the joyous news that the posters are available for sale because I don't know how much they cost; and I can't know how much they'll cost until I sell one.

So I figured, well, fine. I'll mail one to myself.

Oh, please. I already have all the posters I could possibly want! I could paper my walls with them and have enough left over for a really bitter paper throw rug!

(Okay, okay. I could just go to the post office and demand to know how much, in theory, it would cost to mail a poster. It's just that I hate getting into that kind of conversation at our post office. It always seems to turn into something surreal and/or humiliating. "You want to mail this?" "Well, no. I mean, I might, at some point. I hope to. I think -- okay, you know how you have what you think is a good idea, and people say it's a good idea, and then, you know, maybe it pans out and maybe it doesn't, and you just don't know until you get there? So I'm hoping that someday, maybe really soon, I'll be mailing one of these -- maybe a lot of them! I mean, people said they liked them..." Profound silence, then: "So, you want to mail this?" I just don't want to go there.)

No, if I'm going to mail one of these, I'm going to do it right.

So:  The first person with a United States mailing address to email me upon reading this posting can have a free Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List poster.

Here's what you do:

Email me directly. Don't post your email address here. That way lies pain and sadness and way more spam than you already get. No, email me at what this address would be if someone put it together into a working email address:

deborah at (not the actual word at, but that little "a" with a circle around it) 2ds (two D's, you know? My husband and I have the same first initial) dot org.

When you email me, please tell me that yes, you really really want a poster. Put words to that effect in the subject heading, just to simplify life.

Then specify which version you want. You can have the old-school whole-shebang every-word-of-the-original poster, or you can have the shiny new succinct version. (Since the whole point of this is to see what the cost of mailing one poster will be, I can't send you both. Sorry 'bout that.)

Then, when you get my email confirmation, please post a comment here, gloating shamelessly over your victory.

AND: both in the email to me and in your posted comment, please mention what your favorite item on the wish list is.
Just to make that part easier, here's a link to the list, as posted on SHM's web site:
 
http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/001/bitter_homeschooler.html
 
After I get a winner, I'll offer the next three people who email me (and you can live anywhere in the world for this offer) a copy of whichever version of the poster they prefer, at cost. As soon as I figure out what that cost is.

Thanks for playing along with my silliness.