wish fulfillment, the blog

Friends of Elfster,

I am very excited to announce the new design of Elfster.com! 

Our mission is to make the joy of giving fun and easy to experience.  The team at Elfster is passionate about evolving Elfster.com: through the services we offer, through the look of Elfster and through our users’ experience – in pursuit of our mission. 

Our goals in this new design are simple:

• Embrace our history and our roots as a festive and fun Christmas Secret Santa planner
• Set the stage for new group gifting services that can be helpful all year round
• Make the site easier to read, use, and navigate

We hope you’ll love the changes we have made and what we have in store in the months and years ahead!   As always, please let us know what you think.  It is our generous and active user community that feeds out passion!

Best wishes,

Peter Imburg

Founder & Head Elf

It seems I have wine on the mind, along with droughts, as my county in Northern California is in the middle of one and residents have been asked to reduce water consumption by 20% - but I just read about Terracycle (www.terracycle.net) and their many cool recycled products. The one that caught my eye is a rain barrel – I’ve wanted a couple of these for my (sunny, parched) garden for some time. The barrels modified by Terracycle are actually wine barrels repurposed from Kendall-Jackson; really attractive oak wine barrels that are now great for collecting water (www.terracycle.net/rain_barrel.htm).

Other than Terracycle, I haven’t been able to find other companies that are reusing wine barrels except for a few tiny local shops. There’s a ton of information online about how to position the barrels for best water collection. For example, This Old House has good information (www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/article/0,,1180779,00.html).

Ordering an item this large online was a bit daunting, but then I discovered that Home Depot and Walgreens carry the Terracycle rain barrels. So, if you’re looking for an extra bit of help in conserving water, this seems an easy, inexpensive and green idea.

June 15th is coming right up … are you ready to celebrate the dads in your life? I usually have at least 3 to think about. This year it will be my actual dad, my son’s dad (my husband), and my brother, because we usually get together with his family on Dad’s Day-types of holidays.

I’ll confess right now that I haven’t decided what gifts to get – but at least for one of the dads (my husband), I know the direction I’ll probably be taking: Wine. Yeah, we’re winos. One year I got him a case of Bordeaux – all hand chosen for us by an exceptional local wine retailer in DC. In fact, I’ll just give them a shout-out right now: Calvert Woodley (www.wineaccess.com/store/calvertwoodley). If you live near DC, these guys are expert-experts.

We’ll get back to local wine retailers in a moment, but first, if you have a wine lover in your life my suggestion for today is: consider giving them a wine club subscription. In California, it seems like every winery has a "club" and if there’s a special winery that he adores, then this route might work. But I recommend a club that includes a selection of wineries, and I’ll list a few great options below.

My personal favorite is the Wine Garage Club (www.winegarage.net). The Wine Garage is a very cool retailer in Calistoga (Napa Valley) that is dedicated to uncovering spectacular, undiscovered wines for less than $25. Check out their web site and philosophy. I’m a cheap wino and I love to explore, so I’m a very big fan of these guys.

• Gift certificate to Wine.com (www.wine.com), the top online wine retailer in the US and one that gives you an incredible ability to sort wines based on preferences, regions, cost, ratings, etc. Full disclosure: A friend of mine is the CEO here – but this is also a fantastic retailer. (Say "Hi Rich" and tell him Sarah recommended you. So far he’s never offered me any discounts, so maybe this will help.)
• WineQ (www.wineq.com)
• Bottlenotes (www.bottlenotes.com)
• There are also clubs featuring wine regions, like Santa Cruz Mountains Wine cCub (www.santacruzmountainswineclub.com)
• Sunset Magazine Signature Wines (www.signaturewines.com/sunset), a selection of thier favorites
• I also just read about Great ide Wine Unleashed (www.wineunleashed.com)

However, if you have an excellent local wine merchant, getting the dad(s) in your life a hand-picked case of special wines is also a great idea. Give the merchant a budget and have him put together a selection of unusual wines that your dad (husband, father-in-law, etc.) might never try on his own. We’re still enjoying that case of Bordeaux, 7 years later. (Did I mention that it can be kind of a self-serving gift?)

We recently wrapped up a round of Elfster’s Green Gifting.  For the month of May, our guideline was a used book.  The Green Gifters set off on a voyage to find a buried treasure in our bookshelves, and give that treasure a new life in new hands (probably a complete stranger!). 

As a gift, I was pleasantly surprised to find in the mailbox, a very fine treasure from Evan of Redlands, CA.  The book is Blue Latitudes "To Boldy Go Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before."  I am currently only a few chapters in, but already I am finding myself fully engrossed.  The book tells the story of Captain Cook, as the author participates in a recreation of the one of Cook’s journey’s on a replica ship. 

After a very shocking introduction about the death of Cook, there is a passage in this book that describes the influence of Captain Cook on our modern pop phenomenon, Star Trek.  It is funny that in a chapter of this book, I *finally* gained an appreciation for Star Trek which in all my years working in technology, living and studying in Berkeley, and generally being surrounded by Trekkies, that I could never muster in even the slightest way (I don’t think I have even watched a full episode).

 So far so good, and I’m looking forward to reading through the rest.  Thanks again Evan.  And who knows, if this book sounds intriguiging to you, perhaps you’ll get lucky and I’ll draw you in a future Green Gift Exchange

Peter