I love making plans and was delighted when, over morning coffee, my friend mentioned that she'd be working on this fall's approach to PTA annual giving. I happily whipped out a stack of Post-It notes to record and organize our thoughts. What follows are the background points and task lists we put together. You are welcome to use and adapt any part of these for your organization's annual giving campaign.

The neighborhood elementary school PTA has an annual operating budget of $25K, the largest portion of which funds drama programming for every grade level, including 6-9 weeks of instruction and performance (when developmentally appropriate) per grade, with __ students in each class (every student participates in the program, which is endorsed by the grade-level teachers.) Additional PTA funding includes a highly-attended fall festival, art supplies, popcorn sales, and other classroom expenditures.

From my friend's enrollment estimates, costs can be divided as follows:

In a sidebar to today's Wall Street Journal technology article, Websites Wary of Facebook Tracking, journalist Reed Albergotti points us to a potentially harrowing nugget of personal privacy by outlining instructions to download the data Facebook keeps on us.

I couldn't contain my curiosity, and so I took a look. While the contents were slightly amusing (I'm a funny gal) and somewhat useful (I've now downloaded all of my Facebook photos), they're pretty dull. However, I'm not a master of cookies, pixel tags, and IP data. If I had to guess, the aforementioned article's fears are probably centered around the security file included in the download, as well as the association of tags in the ads file.

As Albergotti directes, I navigated to the general settings of my account, clicked on "Download a copy of your Facebook data," and followed the prompts.

This instantly generated the following message to my connected email account:

I recently made the switch from Blogger to Weebly and painstakingly copied over most of my post archive to keep the experience consistent for new readers. I sincerely hope you enjoy meeting up with me at kenwhitney.com/kari.

A cocktail article in Thursday's Wall Street Journal got me thinking about what I value in my beverage-consuming experience. First and foremost, I'm focused on what happens when I receive the beverage. Does it stir my nose? Is the glass cold or warm against my lips? Does the liquor bite the end of my tongue or does it coat and tingle? What flavors am I tasting--herbs? Fruits? Woods? What's the effervescent experience as it passes my throat and enters my digestive tract?

But apparently there's also a place for the bartending performance in my psyche. To charge me $14 and serve me a beverage that's been produced en masse irrationally infuriates me. I have been robbed of an experience--a bonding between the alcohol artisan and myself. I freeze spiked punches for myself, but I expect more when I dine out.

Again, I acknowledge the irrationationality of this! I don't seek out the soup master and demand that my vichyssoise be borne of potatoes unique from another's. I often don't see more than a glimpse of the shaker that holds my beverage. Yet somehow I've become entitled to a labor-intensive experience as a contract of my happy hour purchase.

How do you feel about your bar experience? Do you pin a thought on the dispensary of your drink?