More Trouble Than Its Worth

I tried to upload a photo. This was greatly complicated by the fact that both my kids now have Flickr accounts and I din't realize I was sending photos to my son's account while the computer was logged into my daughter's account. Then Flickr wanted me to verify everything to access MY account, and I've been so spoiled by it just automatically taking me there, I didn't remember my password. Then I went to Blogger, and since I hadn't already "upgraded" to new and improved Blogger, it made me do it now, before I could access anything. Humbug.

I spent the last week or so wrapped up in Valentine Grams for the middle school. The Valentine Grams are basically valentines the students can buy and send to their friends, which are then delivered right before the kids go home. We did this for three days, but there were multiple days of assembling the "grams" themselves, because they were fiddly.

Last year I bought 1500 Valentine pencils on post-holiday clearance. My thought was to keep it very simple, maybe have cardstock hearts, each with a pencil taped to it, and let the students use markers and stamps to personalize them, and sell them for a quarter. That's not the way it worked out, because it was decided that wasn't appealing enough---we had to have CANDY. So, they ended up being a 3" by 4" plastic bag filled with three kinds of candy and a sticker, attached to the pencil with three different colors of curling ribbon, which the students then addressed with their choice of 6 different designs of full-color labels. We did them assembly-line style, but we still could only average about 30 finished grams per person per hour. We sold over 800 of them (in a school with 450 students) for 5o cents apiece, and we were still stuffing and curling until 20 minutes before the last bell on Valentine's Day, as the DJ for the Valentine Dance set up around us. I guess the good new is that we more than paid for the DJ by selling the valentines, and the kids really seemed to have a good time with them.

There was no crafting at my house while this was going on because my hands were tired from tying 2-4 knots per "gram." Yesterday was my first non-PTO volunteering day in over a week and a half (because last week I was there every day running the Scholastic Book Fair.) I was looking forward to getting housework done in preparation for the 3 weeks of houseguests coming up, and maybe picking up some knitting when I unwound before bed. HAH! I managed to fall down the basement steps and land on my head on a concrete floor, wrenching my back, bruising my knees, and spraining (fortunately mildly) both my right wrist and ankle. Sigh.