I went to an auction on Saturday to buy some monitors for school. I learned that my way to pack monitors:
Is not the only way to pack monitors:
By the way, you can fit 46 twenty inch monitors in a Prius.
School
Want some Spanish Books?
I’m trying to sell some Spanish Books on Craig’s List. Anybody want them?
Actually, it doesn’t look like anyone is interested on Craig’s List. Anyone want them for any sort of worthwhile project before I put them in the Free section? You have to come get them.
What about Wally? Can I interest anyone in Wally?
No? Can’t say that I blame you.
Computer Sale 2015
Every year or so we sell off all of the computers that we’ve replaced at Lincoln Lutheran. Last Saturday was our biggest sale ever. It turns out that everything went pretty well (even considering Lauren’s stories). But I actually lost some sleep over the whole process.
We had been working on getting things ready for the sale off and on throughout the school year, but really began working on it in earnest about two weeks ahead of time. I have about 8 students who are part of my Tech Center at school. They help teachers and students who are having problems with their computers, and I wouldn’t have made it through this school year without them.
Those students were actually doing the bulk of the work to get ready. I just had to organize the work into bite sized jobs that they could do. They don’t get paid for the Tech Center work that they do throughout the school year, but we kept track of the hours that they worked to get ready for the Computer Sale and I paid them for that work.
But even with them doing most of the work, I still woke up at 2:00 am on Friday and Saturday and couldn’t go back to sleep. That never happens to me. I’ve always been a very good sleeper. (Just ask my mom.) I didn’t think I was nervous about it, and maybe that wasn’t why I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know. What, am I a sleep doctor? Is that even a thing?
On Friday, during the day I had a couple of groups of students help me carry down all of our computers and stuff to the cafeteria. Boy, I’m glad we did that. It took us until about 6:00 pm to get everything set up. I bet it would have been another 2 hours otherwise.
Saturday rolled around and Lauren and I arrived at 7:30 and the boys arrived at 8:00 and we were all busy with last minute details until we opened at 9:00. There were actually other people wandering around looking at things from about 8:00 on. It was a combination of those people who come to garage sales early and those people who are at school for a tae-kwon-do tournament. I seriously have to remember to do it on the day of the tournament again next year. It sure didn’t hurt to have about 400 extra people walk through.
It was pretty amazing how non-stop busy we were all day. Lauren was a real help. She took care of nearly all of the money (after she felt comfortable dong the credit card transactions). I had no idea how much we were selling, but once or twice she said she was uncomfortable with how much money was on the table, so she took it up to the office.
After 12:00, everything was half price, and that caused an oddly large number of problems with people just walking around with items while they “looked at other things” or people who just hovered around items for 30 minutes. But we did get amazingly busy again after 12:00.
I’ll have to write a note to myself to come up with a better way to deal with that next year. I am certainly open to suggestion if you have any.
We were pretty much done selling things and taking them to cars for people by 1:15, and, after (finally) a break for lunch (all of the pizza was pretty much room temperature by that point), we took the items that we wanted to keep back to the Tech Center. One of my auction buddies (let’s call him Joe), had agreed to take anything that we had left. I let the kids pick anything that they wanted first, then we hauled an entire van-full out to Joe’s van. It really was an entire van-full too. I had never seen a van packed that tightly.
Finally, we totaled up our earnings. I just threw the cash on the table and the kids counted it. They were amazed that there were hundred dollar bills in the pile. The stack of cash was about $3,700 high. They were amazed. They knew we were busy, but they were doing everything but taking money. After that I said we should check the credit card account. Their jaws dropped when I said there was another $1,700 in credit card payments.
I was actually pretty amazed as well. When people I knew came through the sale and asked how well we were doing, I would say that I though we had passed the $2,000 mark. Little did we know.
We cut the gross in half (Lincoln Lutheran gets half the money) and subtracted our expenses (mostly pizza and an ad in the classified section). Then we divided what was left by the 128 hours we worked. and the kids ended up earning $14.00 an hour. They were all excited to do it again next year, and I was glad to have gotten rid of all of the old stuff from the shelves.
The best part? I slept until 6:00 am yesterday.
Yesterday’s April Fools’s Joke
I should have posted this yesterday, so you could enjoy it, but I actually forgot about it until about 6:00 yesterday morning. Jonathon Swärdén wrote the JavaScript that replaces all of the images on a webpage with pictures of Nicholas Cage, Bill Murray, Vanilla Ice, Steven Sigal and kittens.
Our Executive Director texted me this morning:
We were talking about various Practical Jokes on the Nebraska Technology Coordinator’s email list yesterday and I posted the link to our website along with what our Executive Director said and got this reply back:
“Lloyd, what was on the webpage. We did not see it!!”
I went with:
“Hint: Nicholas Cage, Bill Murray, Steven Seagal, and Ice Tea haven’t gone to Lincoln Lutheran for years.”
Valentired
I am exhausted. I know lots of people are, so I’m not saying I’m more exhausted than you, but I’m tired.
Where do I start? I could go on and on about my intense dislike of holidays, but I’ve probably made that point before. This week was like we had two: our concert night and Valentines Day.
Our concert is a Love Songs concert. It’s what we do instead of a Christmas program. It’s not a busy time of year, we sing songs we already know and then we have cookies. Easy Peasy.
Except it wasn’t this year. Last year we were able to use St. John’s gym, but they had basketball games going on this year. (Thanks, Coach Sam.) Instead we had to set up in the Fellowship Hall, and as I was arranging chairs I tried to kid myself that we would all fit. Two minutes before it was time to sing, one of the moms came to tell me that there was no more room in the parking lot (basketball) and the Fellowship Hall was getting very crowded. We hauled everyone up to the sanctuary for a relocated concert led by a very sweaty, hoarse teacher. Nobody noticed me, though, because they were so distracted by the jumping children, and the one boy trying to rearrange the mosaic tiles on the altar.
And then it was Valentines Day. All the pre-work and the mental editing ‘Nope, we’re not doing that this year/ let’s simplify this/ when can I go home?’, and then the actual day (which goes much smoother than I expect), and then collapsing at night.
So, in closing, have yourself a very Happy Valentine’s Day. I am going for a Very Ordinary Saturday.
For photos, I am just going to document changes I made to our party system. They won’t make sense and they don’t have to.
I
The following will be meaningless. Please ignore.
Notes for Future Lauren: instead of using paper strips and stapling hearts to make crowns (which actually turns into the Waiting For The Stapler Center) do the one page color-and-cut thing.
You made hair conditioner and cornstarch Play dough. The recipe says 2 cups of corn starch per one cup of conditioner, but you used nearly 3 cups of cornstarch so it was not disgustingly slimy. Make necklaces using the scoopable stuff tub – that way beads don’t go rolling all over the floor. Pre-string the ribbons and hook on a pipe cleaner.
Have the kids paint papers like Eric Carle and cut hearts out of those. Cheaper and looks nicer. Kids make ‘fancy letters’ on the side of the box.
An unexpected song
I’m not really the kind of teacher who expects it to be silent in class. In fact, if students aren’t talking to me and to each other, I think things are a little boring (I don’t know how Lauren talks to 4 year olds all day).
But my math class has honed to a fine art the ability to distract each other with a single well placed word. So I eventually end up saying, “No talking.” Sometimes “No Talking” is accompanied by “Starts in 15 seconds, so get it out of your system.” and sometimes it’s accompanied by “One freebie.”
But if you talk under the no talking flag (assuming that I actually notice) then you have to spend a minute after school with me for each time you talked. Normally I end up with 1 or 2 students after school. Today I had a quartet. They have to stand near my desk and look properly penitential for the minute, but today I said, “If you don’t want to just stand there, you could sing.”
One of them started singing this song and immediately the other three joined in.
I was suitably impressed.