A Lucky Shopping Trip....Or Maybe Not

To complete my classroom lessons for the upcoming week I needed some things so I went down to Office Max to get them. One of the things I wanted was some thick construction paper or something else to mount some pictures on. I didn't really want to deal with poster board. I liked the idea of card stock better but it wasn't the right size and was kind of expensive. What I ended up buying wasn't much cheaper but I think it will work wonderfully well. I found in the art supplies a pad of watercolor paper. This is really thick and the dimensions are big enough that I can easily mount a full page magazine photo on it to show the kids. Yay!

When I got to the register they were having trouble running my card through because of network problems. So finally they just ran it and I signed for the stuff. More on that later...

Then I went across the street to Barnes & Noble. I was sort of nervous about going in there because I had just spent a bunch at Office Max, but I had a coupon I wanted to use so I bolstered my courage and went in. As I wandered down the aisle I came across a display that had books for teachers. There was a lady looking at them and I stopped to look and we chatted for a moment. Then I noticed it. Just the book I needed. They had copies of 6 + 1 Writing Traits. The school district I'm student teaching in uses this book. So I slapped my coupon sticker on it and delightedly walked off with a copy. As I thumbed through it I found tons of ideas to write into my lesson plans. Yay! Teaching just got easier!

Then I ran by the grocery store on my way home where I bought some much needed supplies. Some of them were paper products. I've been fighting a cold all last week. I'm finally getting better now. Praise God! My debit card didn't work at the register so I had to use my credit card. I was worried about that because is should have. I hadn't gone over the balance in spending. At least I didn't think I had. I decided I'd check the bank balance online when I got home. On the way out of the store the carryout help turned out to be a real klutz. He ran the cart into the back of my ankle. I wasn't badly hurt but it wasn't a pleasant experience. He tried to make nice all the way back to my car. He even held the door for me and shut it after I got in. Nice kid. Then he tried to take the cart between the cars promptly running it along the door so I have a few new scrapes on the trim. Sigh! They aren't horrible but it doesn't help that I can't afford to get them fixed right now. I hope a good wash and wax will take care of it.

When I got home I checked my banking as I'd promised myself I would. Sure enough, with all the trouble running the card at Office Max the charge had gone through twice. No wonder my card got declined at the grocery store. So I called the store and the manager is going to look into it and see if he can't get accounting to reverse the charge. He is supposed to call me back. I hope he does. If he doesn't I'll have to call my bank and have them take care of it. I'm really lucky to bank with a good one. They've reversed double charges before. It's pretty obvious when the charge is the same amount at the same store and goes through twice within something like 15 to 20 seconds.

All in all it hasn't been a bad day. I found out earlier this week that I can't go to the retreat next weekend. I need to have access to a computer and the web to do lesson plans. They don't have that kind of resource at the retreat and I don't have a laptop to take with me to use the ones they do have. Oh well, I'll take myself on a different retreat later after the enormously stressful semester is over. Hopefully I'll have a job by then or at least the makings of one. Now, I'm going to go and heat up one of my frozen dinners the purchase of which got me a free half gallon of really good ice cream. Yay for sales!

And now that I've gotten this post written I have one more thing to do. Blogger has put up a link on their blog page which plays the pictures that are being loaded to the web in real time. As they so accurately said, "It's pretty cool and endlessly fascinating." I'll put a link on the side bar to it. It will be under the Links heading and will be entitled Play.

Happy Sunday and have a good week all!