QOTD: "Today's touchy-feely C.I.A. even has Take Our Daughters to Work Day, although children are closely monitored so they do not overthrow small African governments" - Nicholas D. Kristof, N.Y. Times
Reading: Marian Babson, To Catch a Cat
Listening to: nothing
Decluttering accomplishments: threw out a few more old magazines
This morning at work I found out that a key person from our contractor is leaving. I called him and was somewhat reassured that things would not fall apart. It helps that the person who is taking over his work is someone I know and can work well with. My fear is, however, that he is just the first of what could be a major wave.
It was a frustrating day at work in other ways. I seemed to spend a lot of time just gasping in dismay at documents I review. Today's biggest annoyance was a draft agreement that may undo two years worth of work. That sort of thing is par for the course, but it's still annoying.
I was exhausted when I came home, so I took a "short" nap after dinner. And promptly slept for five hours. I take that as a sign that I really needed the sleep. But it will also screw up my schedule for the rest of the weekend.
I was amused by the news story that Bruce Willis bought girl scout cookies for the troops in Afghanistan. Apparently this is the largest order of the cookies ever and the factory that makes them had to reopen in order to fill it. However, it also strikes me that it's cheating when you have a rich parent who can buy whatever you're selling.
Which reminded me of how much I hated having to sell things when I was in school. I was never a girl scout, so I didn't have the cookies to deal with. But we had all sorts of class fundraisers, starting with magazine sales for the 8th grade class trip to Washington, D.C.. If you live in a small town, you end up with too many kids trying to sell the same things to the same people. The kids who do really well are the ones with lots of relatives who live nearby, but not in town. Those of us with small families could never compete. I remember that there were prizes, as well as credits towards the price of the trip. I know I got a small red radio, but I don't remember what the prize I really wanted was.
I'm vaguer on exactly what the fundraisers in high school paid for. I know that every year we had something to sell - mostly candy or stationery, but one year it was scented candles in fancy glass containers. Those were particularly useless and, therefore, particularly frustrating to sell. Candy was the easiest sell, but I think we sold most of it to one another.
There were also times when I did more straightforward fundraising and I was far more comfortable with that. I was a member of Key Club for a while (although this was before girls were really allowed to join) and we did things like having car washes and pancake breakfasts to raise money for charity. We also took collection jars to local supermarkets and I remember getting away with doing this without being chased off by the simple expedient of wearing a poncho and hiding the jar under the poncho when the store manager came out. I think that what made this easier than selling stuff was the relative anonymity of it.
While I do buy a box or two of girl scout cookies each March, I don't really have kids come to my door selling things these days. It's probably considered too unsafe to go door to door, so they sell only to people they know. There are sometimes people at work with candy to sell for their kids (which is cheating, because somehow I never thought of trying to get my folks to do this) and I'll buy a bar here and there. (The girl scouts set up outside the supermarket, by the way.) It would be nice to see school programs - including extracurricular ones - funded well enough that selling things was entirely unnecessary.
I did, however, recently find a fundraising idea that I thought was kind of cute. I'd told Milo about the personalized Wheaties boxes at the Mall of America. He immediately pointed out that this would be a great going-away gift for somebody. I decided to see if there was a way to do it without going to the Ceral Adventure attraction at the Mall. Searching on-line turned up the Wheaties site, but no personalized boxes. However, I did find two other things. One is a company that makes picture frames that put you on a Wheaties box. But the other one is a company that makes personalized cereal boxes for fundraisers. It's too pricy for a going-away gift, but that wouldn't be an issue for schools.
And, at least corn flakes are something people can actually use. Though the site says that few people ever actually eat the cereal.
Copyright 2002 Miriam H. Nadel