paper: pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

I have no idea what time zone I am in. All I know is that I have Girl Scout Cookies, and that makes everything okay.

Every time I come across Girl Scout Cookies, I have to buy some because a) it’s usually years in between purchases and b) once you have sold Girl Scout Cookies you have a permanent bond with all other Girl Scout Cookie salesgirls and feel the need to keep the faith and promote the almighty merit badge. Plus hello? They are yummy.

The Girl Scouts crack me up with the cookie selling. They refuse to sell their cookies online, preferring to keep cookies available for a certain part of the year in each region. You know that when you have cookies for sale in New England they probably aren’t selling them in Arizona, right? The whole thing rotates. Which is only funny because every girl scout has knocked on the door of a neighbour only to see their face light up at the sight of the order form, followed by the exclamation, ‘It’s Girl Scout Cookie Season!’. Like this is an official season. When really it is different everywhere. It’s genius marketing.

When I sold cookies they were $2 a box and we’re not going to talk about how many years ago that was, so I was impressed that they are only $3.50 now. I wasn’t half bad at the selling of boxes, but selling cookies is this magical time when kids with step-parents get a bonus because we have twice as many people to give the order form to, which is twice as many work places for embarrassed parents to pin it to a bulletin board and say ‘hey – my kid is selling cookies. Don’t you want some Thin Mints?’ and really that’s all you have to say. Thin Mints. Two words and you’ve sold six boxes, and once one person has signed up for six boxes of Thin Mints, everyone else who sees the order sheet will panic buy and it’s brilliant. Even my neighbours used to ask how many boxes the lady next door had bought before deciding on their order. Somehow all that crazy led me to selling upwards of seven hundred boxes one year, and the entire time we are motivated with the idea of the more you sell, the more you earn, so I was convinced there would be something amazing at the end of it. As it turns out, 700 boxes was freakishly high for my little troop but so not even on the radar in the grand scheme of things. But I got my special little merit badge, a little plastic trophy and…a stuffed giraffe. I thought it would be life-size or something. But in truth, it was probably eight inches tall. But it was such a big deal that it took on new meaning and was probably my most treasured possession for far more years than I should admit.

I should also not admit to spending so much time browsing this website to realize that despite my best arguments to the contrary, I am apparently…vintage. The website is really difficult to read, but this page is easier to see and highly amusing if you ever sold cookies.

click for print-sized card.

Mmmm. Cookies.

xlovesx

Comment [4]

Right about now I should be heading home again. It’s a good place to go.

But there are so many good places to go that sometimes it’s a little unfair, you know? I understand that attitude that you shouldn’t visit a place twice when there are still places you would like to go for the first time. And yet I fail miserably at it, as I like the mix of familiar and new you get when you visit a place you like two or three times…you’re not a local but you don’t feel like a completely lost tourist.

Wait. In all reality it’s probably way simpler than I want to make it in my head. I am geographically challenged. I read maps and tell drivers to turn right when there is a large body of water to the right. SatNav was invented for people like me. So although I was just going to wax lyrical about all my theories about why there are places I like to revisit when there are still so many places to go, I’ve realised it all comes down to this:

If I visit two or three times, I just might make it through a day without getting lost.

Click for print-sized card.

Hopefully the cab driver can get me and all my luggage to my flat without getting lost.

xlovesx

Comment [3]

Photo by Naughton321

I love it when Americans ask me what I drive. We (as in we share) drive a car that is so small they don’t sell it in America. It’s not a Smart Car (it’s a Volkswagen) but I like its little stature because it’s efficient (which is good because I just did the maths to convert the price of petrol into American terms and well…we’re paying about $7.87 per US gallon) and equally because I am rubbish at parking and the smaller the car, the less chance I have of hitting things near a parking space.

Oh, the parking space. Our last place had allocated parking so it’s been a while since I dealt with that experience of coming home and driving v-e-r-y slowly in order to not miss any viable parking option. There are a few spaces on either side of our building that are residents only, but there are way more residents than spaces. And there are two streets with parking, but each one requires a different parking permit and is viable for different hours of the day.

So now, if we get a parking space, we don’t move the car until we absolutely must use it. Considering a day of unlimited travel on bus, train and tube costs about the same as a gallon of petrol, it seems like that parking space is pretty wonderful real estate if you can get it. And there are way more characters on public transportation.

Click for print-sized card.

What is in her hand, anyway?

xlovesx

Comment [11]

Photo by Boopsie Daisy

Some days I am not sure which I like more: paper or pens. I started being very particular about pens circa age 12, when I was high into my note-passing-in-class phase. I had discovered the difference between the Bic fine point and the standard medium point and how the fine point turned my handwriting from clumsy and chunky into loopy and feminine. I wasn’t going to touch a medium point pen again if could help it. Even if they didn’t make the fine point in pink or purple, and let me tell you, that was a big sacrifice.

As I could find finer and finer pointed pens, I got happier and happier. A roommate at college had fine point gellyroll pens in every colour under the sun, and I think that could have been the biggest reason to housesit for her one summer. The flat was teeny-tiny, the oven didn’t turn on and the drain clogged like seventy-two times a day, but I could sit next to a sunny window with approximately one-hundred-and-sixty-three shades of fine point pen and doodle and write to my heart’s content.

I could only write in my teacher planner with the 0.4 pens from Paperchase, and I colour coded my grading sheets with the 0.5 because they came in the much better colour scheme of aqua, pink and purple.

And all my scrapbook pages are finished with this pen, which I buy by the box and have in a dedicated drawer that is exactly the height of my right hand as I stand at my table.

Click for print-sized card.

Of course right now, I am working on things involving fountain pens, with extra schwoops and curls. With ink in a pot. It’s all rather lovely.

xlovesx

Comment [4]

Photo by Arlsan.

This is part two…so make sure you have the card from the 15th before you try today’s exercise.

Click for print-sized card.

xlovesx

Comment [2]

Photo by Mosippy

When I was ten, I had the most amazingly creative and memorable teacher in the history of the world who had us do projects that probably made parents roll their eyes and wonder what exactly we were supposed to learn from things like dressing a pinecone as a small person and carrying it in our pocket for a week. They probably rolled their eyes more when they came to school for parent-teacher conferences and saw that she balked at rigid classroom order in favour of letting us all have pillows on our chairs and our own box of kleenex on our desks. But clearly she knew that pillows and kleenex would keep us in our seats and focused on our work just as she knew that carrying a pinecone could teach us about both responsibility and perspective.

To this day, she is one of my most favourite people in the whole wide world.

Click for print-sized card.

xlovesx

Comment [5]

Photo restored and uploaded by Patrick Q

This is something that came to me out of force (it’s a required text for a syllabus I taught for several years) and yet it will probably always stay with me. As a student, I couldn’t stand set texts. I hated them on principle. As a result, I ruined several books for myself when I didn’t need to. Some of them I rediscovered later on my own terms; some burned me out so much I refused to teach them in my own classroom. And when I started having to teach things on a set list, I was convinced I would grow to hate all of them too, so things like Before you were mine were a sign that clearly I had matured in some way or another. {Of course, some of my students would tell you I had just become more boring, but I am settling with mature. If cataclysmic is my favourite word in the English language, boring is certainly my least favourite.}

With teenagers, there’s this tricky few weeks where you have to get it into their heads that poetry is not all Dr Seuss. (Don’t get me wrong, Dr Seuss is lovely. Really lovely. But there is also more.) They start being convinced that poetry must rhyme. That rhyme is more important than meaning. So much so that it’s almost like they are on one side of the classroom with picket posters that shout ‘RHYME!’ while the teachers are in the corner with smaller signs that ask politely ‘But what about meaning?’ and eventually it all gets ironed out. We hope. (Then of course we go and confuse things with poets who can do both rhyme and meaning and well, they are just too good.) So in nearly every lesson I have observed of teachers fighting this little battle, the teacher uses a quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that poetry is “the best words in the best order”. (Please, my former students who are sitting your exams this year: know who said that if you are going to quote it. He is pretty important and his life is pretty interesting anyway, so just read about him here and never, ever say ‘A famous man once said…’ on an exam paper. Thanks.)

(Can I say much more in brackets today? Sheesh.)

Anyway, the best words thing sometimes makes me cringe, but in the case of this poem I quite like it. I am not very good at drawing on the white board but it never stopped me, so I would doodle some lady in a skirt with a big smile and curly blonde hair and ask students for words to describe her personality, so that inevitably someone would contribute ‘bubbly’. So let’s take bubbly. What can bubbly mean? And after we get through the description of personality, we would get to bubbles and champagne and all those other things until we got to soda. How would you describe soda? Here, we call it a fizzy drink. So then we would stop right there and read the poem for the first time. And question number one would be ‘Why call her fizzy and not bubbly?’

Moments like that are why I love teaching English.

And off we would go from there.

Click for print-sized card.

If you want to add a Valentine’s theme to this, you could always write about a couple rather than a person. Your choice.

(More in brackets: a lot of people keep asking me why I am still into teaching English if I’m not doing it right now. If you haven’t figured it out, teaching English isn’t something I have left forever. I don’t think I ever could. I needed to change gears before I burned out the engine, and once that car has had some fine-tuning, this will all be relevant once again. She’s just in the garage for a nice break. Ha! Metaphor!)

(Sadly, English teacher humour doesn’t get much better than that.)

xlovesx

Comment [10]

Photo from Living Etc via Hidden in France

I suppose it’s no secret that I find inspiration in cooking. I think it’s because there are so many layers that I find magical: beautiful kitchens and the designs of furniture, appliances and containers, the artful still life of food before we eat, the mix of art and science that creates recipes that are handed down on syrup-stained index cards with hand-scrawled ink, the way ingredients can be versatile and shift from sweet to savoury, mild to spicy, and that whole will-it-rise/will-it-not thing keeps me on pins and needles when I am cooking. So for all the books, magazines and websites who say it’s boring to talk about what you had for lunch on your website, I quietly disagree.

So today, let’s write about food, okay?

xlovesx

Comment [15]