"I keep losing my pencils!"

I couldn't possibly seem to realize how one of my students never had a pencil when needed. Watching him always in the pursuit of looking for one, I began to wonder what had happened to those pencils. I was sure that before every week started, he had a fully stocked caddy with everything that he could possibly need. Yet week after week, we would stock him up from scratch. That is of course, until I helped him clean out his "Writer's Toolkit" today. "Oh, let me just help you organize your papers (turning it upside down)......oh my....(as about 30 pencils comes spewing out)....what do we have here?" We both look at each other in shock. And then we lost it. We both just sat there laughing and laughing...now disturbing the whole class. It was uncontrollable. Now everyone was dying of laughter. I guess at this time of the year, anything that used to be annoying is just plain funny. Interesting how bonding moments come about.

From May 26, 2011

It takes a garage sale...

to finally meet your neighbors.

The other day our team was having their annual garage sale for any staff who were leaving. We decided to hop on the bandwagon, and saw it as an opportunity to get rid of some of our....well...precious junk. We soon realized the curse of having lots of storage space. It's like having a big purse - the bigger it is, the more stuff you fill it with. That is until you decide to purge.

What we didn't realize was that our next door neighbor would soon catch wind of our little garage sale. All of a sudden, we see her mosey on in still wearing her pajamas to have a look. That little "have a look" turned into 30 minutes of her bargaining with me and laughing over how fun it was! It was so surreal to be on the end of things...this time the market was in my house! She was so delighted when she left that minutes later we were invited into her house to sit and have some juice with her husband. What a sweet couple, and what a memory! I wonder where this new friendship will take us.

So thrilled to get rid of all this extra stuff. This sure did help to put things into perspective of how much we don't need.