October 2011 – The UnderToad

Friday Surpriday

As followup to what was otherwise one of my most annoying days this Fall, I received a nice little surprise in the mail today.

Take a journey back with me to September 22 of this year, and what I announced to the world through the annals of Facebook:

I had just left the volunteer first peek of my first (and last) consignment sale. I went in with really hopeful expectations and yet a pretty small wishlist in the first place, but managed to walk out with very little to show for it. I was annoyed and disappointed in what was purporting to be a colossal waste of time. (And on top of that, it turned out I actually managed to make less than my predicted profit, which I really didn’t think was possible.)

I came home just in time for my 9:30 appointment with a little website called Totsy (aptly named because it is geared toward all things “tot” for desperate deal seeking mothers, like me, who like to outfit their children in really trendy shit but not actually pay premium prices for any of it). From my very limited experience with Totsy, it seems this website advertizes for and then conducts closeout sales for any number of different stores and websites. It looks like the majority of their sales revolve around brand new products trying to gain customer attention, or seasonally old products, simply trying not to go to waste. The sale I had marked on my calendar (let the patronizing begin), and the only time I’ve actually utilized Totsy, was a Stride Rite shoe sale.

Most parents know that Stride Rite pretty much owns a monopoly on decent children’s shoes, which is why they can get away with charging $50 for a pair of shoes that is only meant to last six months before the kid outgrows them. This is also why I had the Totsy Stride Rite sale marked on my calendar. The way it works is the sale is advertised, but you cannot see any of the items nor the prices until the sale opens at a specific time. Once it does open, you must shop and pay in a hurry, because your cart empties itself every twenty minutes. I’m sure you can only imagine what happens when two hundred thousand mothers are all attempting to purchase $10 pairs of brand new Stride Rite’s at the same time, online.

Long story short, the crashing Totsy server managed to occupy me through four episodes of Dawson’s Creek. It seemed like every time I got my cart filled and my information down, the order would fail to go through. I’d refresh and refresh, and then my twenty minutes would be up and my cart would suddenly be empty. It is like the virtual equivalent of running through a crowded Walmart on Black Friday, sucessfully grabbing the exact five items you had your heart set on, and just as you get in line to pay for your rightfully obtained deals (and celebrate your luck) a big man in a black coat comes up behind you, grabs your shopping cart out from under your unsuspecting gaze, and chucks your treasures to the back of the store. There’s no time to retaliate (or cry), because you have to go retrieve them before someone else does, and start the process all over again. It was an adrenaline rush, if nothing else.

My sale opened at 9:00. At 11, I finally got a confirmation email. This should have been cause for a double fist pump, but by this time, between Dawson’s Creek, a hot laptop, and the whiskey, I was pretty much just ready for bed. Big surprise, the next morning our credit card called with news of some “potentially fraudulent activity” from the night before, as I had been charged for the same order a total of five times. I called the company and prepared myself for a morning of sitting on hold and more frustration.

Not the case. I was pleasantly surprised to find the lady answering the phone spoke English as her first language (point for Totsy), one, and was actually really cool about the entire thing from the night before. I was right when I guessed that they’d been fielding phone calls all morning from other moms (who were possibly much less cool than I was about the whole thing). She ended up canceling all but one of my orders and said I wouldn’t actually get charged until it shipped.

I sort of chalked the entire thing up to “lesson learned” and though I’ve been diligently checking my credit card statement for the past few weeks, I wasn’t about to go into this deal with the same high hopes I’d had for the consignment sale.

The good news of the week is that today, almost a month later, I received four of the five pairs of shoes I had my eyes on that night (for a grand total of $46). My credit card was charged appropriately, and I also have a $5 credit in my Totsy account as an apology for the big man in the black coat. Can’t say I’m in the mood to fight the same laundry-basket-wielding moms who elbow each other through consignment sale doors, literally or virtually, again any time soon, but Totsy has officially scratched a competitive mom itch for me, this month.

Confessions

Psychotic Money Saving

As an above average deal-finder and coupon user, I have admitted before that it is a conscious goal of mine not to let money saving become an obsession. (The fact that I’m blogging about deal-finding again is arguable proof that I’m not fully succeeding at this goal.) But I’d like to say for the record, that obsession, for me, is a far milder term than it is for so many others, when it comes to the grocery budget. I’d say comparatively, I’m not nearly as psychotic as the so-called extreme couponers around me, who’s visible-to-the-public-obsession manifests itself in the following ways: (1) spending hours clipping and organizing coupons into what looks like one of those baseball card display binders, then walking up and down every single aisle of the grocery store attempting to match sale prices with an available coupon; (2) purchasing dozens of Sunday newspapers, or worse, stealing the coupon inserts out of the Sunday papers at Walmart; (3) anger at the cashier when a coupon doesn’t scan correctly or when the price on the register doesn’t match the price they planned to pay, resulting in entire carts full of products left at the front of the store for a bag boy to put away (I swear I’ve never done this but I’ve seen it more times than you can imagine); (4) stockpiling Windex and BBQ sauce whenever it is free (which, by the way, is about every 6 weeks) as if either one of these items will be the most helpful in the event of an apocalypse. *Sidenote: does anyone ever get to the very bottom of a bottle of Windex? It is like the Loaves and Fishes of cleaning products. I think I’m still using the bottle we purchased in Greensboro six years ago.*

Lord, no. I am not this bad. I’m actually a little humiliated to admit some of the things I haven’t caught myself doing in a while, which is to say, at one time in my life, I may have displayed one or more of the following behaviors: (1) refusal to purchase something I actually need with the knowledge that I can either find it cheaper somewhere else or have a coupon for it at home; (2) anger at my husband for buying something at Sam’s Club that seemed like a great deal to him, but was still more expensive than the price I can find it for on a regular basis elsewhere; (3) waking up in the wee hours of the morning, panicked at the thought that I’ve let one of my drug store rewards expire, and the subsequent inability to fall back asleep as a result.

In fact, number 3 above, is the reason my brother-in-law believes drug store rewards are a scam. His explanation is that they are lying to you when they advertise something as “Free, after…” and they force you to come back into the store within a couple of weeks and buy something you probably don’t need, just to spend the “reward” they gave you for the item you purchased guilt-free two weeks ago, believing it was free. To some extent, I would agree with this. In fact, I hope more people are treating the system this way than the way I am treating the system. Because if everyone was able to roll-over drug store rewards in the way that I have done this year, the system would cease to work. Drug stores would go out of business. And so would my source of joy. In life.

So I was doing a little mental math in the car this morning on the way home from Lowe’s Foods.

The subject of my number crunching: gas rewards.

Lowe’s Foods, a local NC grocery store that is on the high end for prices (similar to Rosauers in Spokane or Ukrop’s in Virginia, but a notch below The Fresh Market and Whole Foods) has introduced this new Gas Rewards thing. I’ve actually been getting the print-outs all year, as my store was one of the pilot stores for trying out the program, and throwing them away. All these months, I’ve been looking at this little slip of paper and assumed it was telling me I could save five cents TOTAL on my next gas purchase. I kept filing them away assuming they’d build up over time and then forgetting about them. Now that it has been launched state-wide, there has been more explanation and advertisement for the way it works. Every time you spend $100 at Lowe’s you earn five cents off per gallon on your next fillup at certain gas stations. For a minute, I was kicking myself for all the times I let the reward expire.

But then it hit me.

Five cents off per gallon for every $100 of groceries purchased?

My car, when the gas light is on, only requires about twelve gallons to fill up. At five cents per gallon, I’m saving sixty cents.

Without going into the algebra lesson let me break this down quickly: this is less than 1% savings, people. I think the value of the dollar is depreciating at more rapid rate than I’m accumulating gas rewards.

This also brings me to my next point. I have admitted to my deal-finding obsession within the confines of grocery and drug store walls. But nobody has said anything about the gazillions of people who are willing to drive across town to save five cents a gallon on gas. Number crunching or not, if you were to add up the amount of time it takes to make it to another gas station, not to mention the ounces of gas burned to get there, you might be surprised to find out that your sixty cent savings was spent in the journey. Who’s the psycho now?

Confessions

A Grammar Lesson

I frequently receive emails with a disclaimer that reads, basically, “I hate emailing you because I’m always afraid you’re correcting my grammar and judging me.” And, for the record, oh, semi-educated world, such fear is not entirely unfounded, but only half-way correct. I’m not correcting your grammar. I’m simply noticing your grammatical mistakes. And judging you.

That said, English teachers actually have a much harder time getting away with grammatical mistakes than the average human, for obvious reasons. It might come as a surprise to know that in sending weekly parent-student emails from my classroom, I actually freaked out before pushing the send button. Only the bravest would have dared call me on an actual mistake, but the truth is, it did happen from time to time. I also reread every single one of these blog posts about four times before pushing “publish” and even then, John (or my mother, or my brother-in-law) often sends me an email before the end of the day with a brief correction.

I know I’ve already admitted to losing my grip on spelling at some point in my life. It seems like it had to have happened with the onset of word processing everything, or more likely, the invention of the squiggly red line and right click button, but it very well may have started in 6th grade when the bell dinged in round 1 at the Area-District Spelling Bee. My word? Podium. (It’s like my subconscious decided at that very moment, “So what if you can’t spell? Good spellers are stoopid! Take that!”)
Sidenote: before publication, I was forced by that very red line to right click “subconscious,” above.

There are certainly such things as “acceptable grammatical mistakes” in the proper context. Some call it poetic license. I call it, my blog. And while I’d never use them in a professional format, or in an educational publication, for example, in my personal writing I wholeheartedly embrace the bending of certain grammatical conventions like punctuation. And sentence fragments. The difference between me and everyone else at this point is, I DO IT INTENTIONALLY.

At any rate, there have been plenty of times whilst wielding a magenta Expo, that I’ve had to stop and ask 29 wide eyes, “Wait a minute. Is that even right?” And one argument that arose with frequency (not only in my classroom but between me and legal writing “friends”) was a question of commas. In fact, up until three days ago, I didn’t even know this particular comma had a name. Now I do. And I understand him. And, if I go back into the classroom one day (assuming the school is in no way associated with the Baptist church), I will make an overhead projection of this very visual, and teach my classes accordingly.

A lesson on The Oxford Comma:

I cannot take credit for finding this picture. I have Facebook and Josie to thank for that. And while I’m standing at my grammar podium, I’ll say this: I know grammar snob blogs exist en masse. I am not the first (and hopefully won’t be the last) to complain. But a recent hormone induced riff with John has put in the mood to make lists, so without further ado, here are the mistakes which make me want to chuck Expo markers at people’s heads. Note: these were also displayed in permanence via homemade laminated posters around the walls of the room I once called home from 8:30 to 4pm, five days a week.

A lot is TWO. WORDS.

Y.O.U. + A.R.E. = you’re.
It isn’t that difficult, people.

Your 4th grade teacher was being lazy when she taught you that sentences cannot begin with the word because. They can. It is called a subordinate clause and it doesn’t matter if it comes at the beginning or the end of the sentence, as long as it is connected with a comma to a subject and a verb. What she should have been proclaiming from the rooftops, instead, was: “Never begin a sentence with the word which, unless you are asking a question.”
NOTE: the rant wasn’t part of the poster. It merely verbally accompanied my pointing out of the lesson within. It often concluded with, “And if you are still in touch with your 4th grade teacher, do the world a favor and pass this little nugget along. If not for yours than for my future.”

There. They’re. Their.
There’s a difference. They’re’s a difference. Their’s a difference.

If I see any of the following:
LOL | B4 | b/c | ♥ | 🙂
I will physically throw up on your paper, let it dry, and then hand it back to you.

Confessions

What Should I Read Next?

I need to say for the record that there are several things I do not miss about teaching public school. Namely: parent complaints/meetings; student sense of apathy; 30% failure rates due in large part to laziness, then the direction to “give them an option for passing” long past due dates; classes with 30+ students; poor regulation of heating and cooling, resulting in never being able to dress for the season; lack of windows. There are also several things I do not miss about teaching private school: parent complaints/meetings; student sense of entitlement; 20% A-B borderline students, then the direction to “give them an option for the A” long past due dates; classes with only one student who would rather carry on 90-minute personal conversations with me, than do work; working the “car line” from the parking lot from February to April, the coldest rainiest months of the year (which was, essentially, calling the names of mostly high school students to alert them to the fact that their parents were waiting, a fact they very well could have ascertained themselves by simply watching out the windows of the gym).

That said, there are probably more things I actually do miss about teaching, both public and private school, and it helps me once in a while to remind myself that the bad days and the good moments did not usually feel equal, even though they probably were. I miss getting to dress up in adult clothes and cute shoes without the risk of being stepped on or touched with grimy hands (though, not so much when I was pregnant, because most kids thought this was a free pass to belly rub their way into my good graces). I miss writing on white boards. I’m a freak. But I really like multi-colored white board markers and notes which require their use, in full. I do actually miss those moments when students decided to like me, and then told me so. It was usually late in coming, but often worth the months of sarcasm, me vs. you verbal fights, and write-ups. I’m quite sure now that I’m gone, there’s not a single student left who still hates me. I miss journaling for the first 10 minutes of every class, with my students. (I was an excellent role model.) But most of all, I miss the reading time. I miss reading Ender’s Game (and other books) aloud to my classes. I miss Fridays, which were made up of silent reading, three times a day, 45 minutes at a time. On average, including the texts I was teaching, I could read close to seven books a semester. Fourteen a year. All because of my personally implemented mandatory Friday silent reading.

It took me almost three months to finish the last book I read, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I also realize that as Oprah’s bookclub pick from 2008, I was a little behind the trend curve to even pick it up. I found it a little more than ironic, therefore, while trudging through the ever slow second half, that I never caught the fact that it is a modern parallel to Hamlet. I’ve read Hamlet on my own at least four times. I taught Hamlet. How the death of the father by poison, then the revelation, by way of a ghost, to the father’s son, that the uncle did it, escaped me, I can only blame on my months out of the classroom. In fact, I don’t think you can Google The Story of Edgar Sawtelle without seeing “Hamlet” somewhere in the byline, yet, seriously, I read the entire book not knowing every character would basically be dead by the end. Had I known of the intentional parallel, I might have finished the book a little sooner. And. I might have liked it a little more.

As it was, the story was okay, but it didn’t blow my mind, as it did Oprah’s and so many of her million viewers. I’m now picking up two books simultaneously – one for bookclub: Shadow Tag (Louise Erdich) and one that has been on my to-read list for more than a year: The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak). If you’ve read either feel free to pass along some nuggets of opinion, and don’t worry about spoiling the endings. I’ve always been a reader who skims the last chapter of a book to make sure the ending is worth the entire read. Surprise ending are so overrated for busy people with long to-read lists. For this very reason, I have a very select handful of good friends I can count on to recommend good books, and outside of that list, I generally (politely) ignore you-should-read… suggestions.

I can assure anyone, however, that I can always be counted on for suggested worthwhile reads, even if your taste resides at the Nicholas Sparks and John Grisham level. Don’t be offended, Sparks/Grisham lovers. I’m not mocking nor looking down on you. It’s just that, if I can get just as much (or more) out of the movie version, I will more than likely forgo the reading of the book. I can, however, suggest something for even you.