The Earthling's Notebook 2008-10-07T10:30:01Z http://blog.earthlingshandbook.org/atom.aspx Quick Blogcast The Cheap Thrills of Thrifty Fashion tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-10-06:228d2923-29e6-4dd4-b1a3-e837c711001c EnviroBecca 2008-10-06T23:49:56Z 2008-10-06T22:55:00Z
What? That's not your idea of fun and excitement? Well, you've got a point, but you have to realize that this sorting process includes my flinging off my clothes at unexpected moments, to try on other garments, and that adds to the romance. We had a lot of fun doing this job in parallel and getting to have a conversation that wasn't interrupted every 14 seconds by jabbering about trains or demands for more cheese. (The kid ate literally a quarter-pound of colby-jack yesterday! Apparently he has some sort of cheese deficiency.) Also, we were able to sort the clothes into many piles, without anyone coming along to show us The Way He Usually Does It.

We wound up with a lot of piles because we forced ourselves to give up some clothes that we really don't wear anymore, and each item had to be categorized according to what shreds of usefulness we believe still could be wrung out of it. 

Both Daniel and I like to make clothes last as long as possible. The trouble is, when a garment has become shabby-looking or uncomfortable or somehow less appealing than other items, it winds up in the back of the drawer all season, not getting worn. Both of us have a strong instinct to hang onto things in case they might come in handy, and that often serves us well, but it's possible to take it too far.

For example, two years ago I bought three long-sleeved knit tops at Target because they were on sale and they came in such nice colors. I think I did try them on but had Nicholas with me and wasn't paying close enough attention to the fit, and I think they then shrank a little when washed. At any rate, by last winter these tops were tugging on my shoulders, discouraging my elbows from bending, and creeping up around my neck...but the useful colors and relative newness kept me from replacing them: "I can't buy that; I already have a royal blue long-sleeved top." Last night I put those tops on the yard sale pile. They'll go to someone who is the right size for them, and I can have tops that fit me!

And I don't have to buy them new. Today I'm wearing my "new" sweater, which makes me very happy; it's just the kind I wanted. I got it at Goodwill. I still have sweaters I got at Goodwill when I was in college 14 years ago. I still have a sweater I inherited from my grandma when she died 20 years ago, and I have worn it regularly every winter since then.

When you wash all your laundry in cold water and line-dry it, things last. Some things last a really long time. If you stay the same size (or nearly so), then you wind up with a lot of clothes that are 10, 15, 20 years old. This has its advantages: Your old familiar clothes are broken-in to your shape and weathered to cozy softness. On the other hand, you can wind up bored with the lack of novelty or looking frowsy because all your clothes are fraying at the edges. If you enjoy shopping, like I do, then you wind up buying new (to you) clothing and cramming it in next to things you can't bear to part with, and after a few years you're discovering that you own garments you'd forgotten all about because they got buried. (Two good methods of preventing this problem are to live in a very small home or to move every two years. We've abandoned those approaches for good reasons, but sometimes I miss them!)

Some clothes that are still wearable, in theory, are just not going to be purchased by any yard-sale shopper. Nobody wants to buy someone else's stretched-out socks worn thin in the heels, even if they aren't worn through and are a hard-to-find shade of green; you might be able to ditch them on the FREE STUFF! table, but only if somebody with a need for cleaning rags stops by. These clothes always make me think of the folktale about the man who "wore it and wore it until it was all worn out" and then cut it down and made a smaller garment. There's got to be some way to use them...

Say you have a nice soft knit shirt whose collar and hems have stretched out so that it looks sloppy. Cut them off. (Use really sharp scissors, not the ones you use to cut paper.) Now you have a hemless shirt that makes a comfortable inner layer under sweaters, where a collar can be too bunchy. If you get too hot and wind up exposing that shirt, you can tell everyone the Flashdance look is back in style! The cut-off bands of fabric can be used as hair bands, sleeping-bag ties, cable ties, or to hold vining plants in place.

Daniel brought out from storage two old tie-dyed T-shirts that he hadn't worn in years because they were falling apart but that he couldn't part with because of their cool patterns. One of them turned into an undershirt, as above. The other was so worn that it looked like Swiss cheese around the shoulders. I cut off that part and all the hems and seams. Then I spread out the usable fabric and cut it into 9-inch squares. (If you spread the fabric on carpet, you can press the ruler into it to make nice straight lines to cut on--no pencil or chalk needed!) Then I cut the rest into pieces of whatever size was convenient--most about 5"x9". The squares are 5 new, cool tie-dyed, very soft handkerchiefs for Daniel. The 6 odd-sized pieces will go into a box next to our bed, to be used like tissues but washed and re-used.

Old socks make great hand puppets. Just give them some clothes to cover the threadbare heels. I put my nicer-looking discarded socks into the bin of Girl Scout craft supplies and will look for an opportunity to suggest that my troop make sock puppets!

The rest of the old socks went into the rag bag, to be used for dusting and polishing things. Having a good supply of rags means we can throw them away after a cleaning job, rather than trying to get them clean and not send them back to the clothing drawers by accident.

Daniel had spent most of Saturday mending clothes, some of which he'd been wearing routinely even though they were falling to shreds. Last night he found that many of his winter clothes needed work, too. He held up his plaid flannel bathrobe and said musingly, "I think I can fix this," and I started rolling on the floor laughing because the robe had an enormous T-shaped rip in the lower rear portion, which last winter made him look like he was wearing a hospital gown, and which was now held together with a binder clip! It looked ridiculous, and seeing it brought back memories of how he looked in it last winter, and it was just preposterous to imagine trying to salvage it. (He did, though! He had saved the silly matching flannel bag--unsuitable for any other use because of the enormous scratchy tag sewn to the front of it with two rows of firm, tiny stitches--in which the robe had come from The Gap. He cut a patch from the bag and used it to reinforce the robe and sewed up the rips with the sewing machine. It now has a strangely puckered spot, but it looks like an old bathrobe again, instead of like something a homeless person would wear.)

We cast aside many items that had been with us for years: The sweatpants Daniel got for Christmas 1996 from our then-housemate Curt, made of black poly-cotton that held together really well but stretched to a shape appropriate for someone with a much larger butt and no calves. Those weird socks designed to make you look like you have shoes on, if your feet are shaped like shoes or at least are the right size for the socks, which mine are not. The cotton batik dress, missing its belt, cast off by one of my uncle Carl's friends when I was 12, which I used as a summer nightgown for 20 years and found convenient for breastfeeding because all the fabric at the sides of the chest has crumbled away. We put in our time with these garments, but now we're done!

We spent our evening marveling over old clothes that have served us for years and still look great, putting aside things we hope will find good homes with other people, getting excited over beautiful "new" hankies, planning yet more mending, laughing at the things we'd kept too long, modeling possible new combinations of old clothes, and winnowing our wardrobes to things we'll actually wear. We completed a chore, but we also spent time together, reminding ourselves how well our values match. We refilled our drawers and closet with clothes that are mostly far from the cutting edge of fashion, and we felt rich. We spend so little money on clothing, yet we have so much, enough to keep us warm and comfortable for weeks between launderings, and so many interesting and colorful garments, each one with its history and accumulating memories. We are determined to make the most of what we have, and last night we laughed at some of our sillier attempts to squeeze value out of every garment...but we laughed, too, because it's working, because we are swimming in an abundance of great stuff.
 
]]> Operation Confuse-a-Bagger tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-09-19:3da2805c-c41e-48e6-a63f-21b60a1a7d3b EnviroBecca 2008-09-19T11:53:25Z 2008-09-19T12:10:00Z on YouTube!

Then, just recently, I happened to look at Lynne Powell's blog.  She's a good writer and had just won the LJ Idol competition, for which she wrote a number of great essays, like this one about running out . . . and this one about KGB and Operation Confuse-a-Bagger.

Both times, it was a shock to hear/read this story, in which I am a main character, told so differently from the way I recall it!  I know, I know, there's "the folk process" and the unreliability of people's long-term memories and the fact that no one person was present for every part of the Operation, and of course Shawn had to trim the story for live performance and Lynne had to work it into the parameters of her competition.  I don't mean to say they did a bad job of telling this story.  It's just that it actually happened (according to my memory) somewhat differently than they said, and I think they left out (or got wrong) some of the funniest parts!

Obviously, the only way to get this story told right was to tell it myself!  I got in touch with KGB and went on the Underground Tour (KGB's annual guided tour of the Carnegie Mellon University campus) to tell the story in a duet with Shawn.  It went pretty well, considering that we hadn't, like, rehearsed or anything.  We stuck to the part of the story he'd told before but got the facts straight this time.  (He very graciously responded to most of my corrections by saying, "You're right; I forgot about that.")

But it's still not the whole story, and that's why I'm writing this.

The KGB
No, no, not that KGB!  This one.  It's everything Lynne said and more.  It's the place for geeks, all kinds of geeks, even people like me who might not seem like geeks because we have some fashion sense and don't know C++ but who always felt like weirdos in our white-bread high schools, to get together and be ourselves and do some weird, silly stuff.  It's a big group of friends who take care of each other, with an electronic bulletin board where you can always find someone to take care of your houseplant for the summer (thanks, Mike!) or insist that all your troubles will seem smaller if you come over to his dorm right now for caramel ripple ice cream (thanks, Dale!) or send e-mails to your lonely dad when he has to work late on his 50th birthday (thanks, everybody!).  It's a group in which a shy person like myself can become actually sort of popular and get elected to office and find herself giving a weekly extemporaneous oral report in front of 50 people and loving it!

I was recording secretary.  KGB refers to this officer as "rec sec" for short.  I developed a habit of signing all messages regarding official business "---'Becca recca secca" and I am known by that name to this day.  Once in a while somebody will come up to me at a bus stop or someplace and say, "Hey, aren't you 'Becca? recca secca?" and, even if they are not wearing a trenchcoat or a computing-related T-shirt, I know they must be a komrade.

Here's how I joined KGB: During the Activities Fair held in the first week of my freshman year, I noticed two guys sitting behind a table with a lava lamp on it and a giant banner across the front reading, "DO NOT LICK."  I asked, "What is this?" and one of the guys replied, "We're the KGB.  Would you like some dental floss?"  I took the floss.  The other guy said, "Underground Tour.  Friday, 8pm.  Meet in Gray Matter.  Dress inconspicuously."  I went on the tour, but before that I found my way to my first meeting by following the mysterious signs that said, simply, "THATAWAY" with an arrow.  How could I resist?  I joined that day.

Operation Confuse-a-Bagger
Among the many nefarious projects of KGB was an endeavor to reach out to potential members by over-representing the weirdness available to them, should they choose to attend Carnegie Mellon.  Several times a year, the university holds an event called Sleeping Bag Weekend, when high school seniors applying to Carnegie Mellon can come and sleep on the floor of a dorm room and spend a whole night and day experiencing campus life.  These people are called Baggers.  KGB's aim was to Confuse them.

Operation Confuse-a-Bagger took place at least once before I started college.  We repeated some of the same strategies that had been used before, as well as making up many of our own.

I offered to host because I didn't have an uncool roommate to cope with; my roommate had moved in with her girlfriend, but since her girlfriend already had a roommate she couldn't change her official address, so Housing didn't assign me a new roommate.  My friend Kevin suggested that he move into my room for the Operation and pretend to be my roommate.  He brought his mini-fridge, which KGB members stocked entirely with single-serving containers of yogurt.

Part One: February 1992
My Bagger arrived.  Her name was Nina.  We chatted briefly.  Then the door of Kevin's closet opened, revealing a rack of all-black clothing and Shawn, who stepped out, said a quick hello, and departed the room.
    "Who was that?"
    "Oh, that's Shawn.  My roommate rents him the closet floor for study space.  You see, Shawn's roommate and his girlfriend can be kind of...loud...so Shawn needed a quiet place to study."  I opened the closet door to show Nina the cozy space, complete with cushion, small lamp, pencil jar, and physics textbook.

Then we set off to "meet my roommate and my boyfriend for dinner."  We went to the Tartan Grill dining room, and my boyfriend Arch arrived right on time, but my "roommate" did not.  We waited and waited, while chatting with Nina about the many features of our university.
    Finally I frowned at my watch and said, "Jeez, where is Kevin?"
    Nina, puzzled, said, "Your roommate's name is Kevin?"
    "Yeah.  Where the hell is he?  We agreed to meet at 6:30!"
    Arch started talking about Kevin's difficulties with electrical engineering lab, dropping in male pronouns at every opportunity, while Nina looked more and more baffled.  Finally Kevin appeared, with apologies, and after we'd all gotten our food we explained how my roommate had left and Kevin wasn't getting along so well with his roommate (true) so he'd decided to move into my room.  It was not until that very moment that I considered the possibility that my Bagger might not be comfortable with sleeping in the same room as a strange man!  (That's what six months in KGB will do to your sense of propriety.)  Luckily, she didn't object.  Kevin, even when dressed all in black, was not a very threatening presence.

When we got back to my room after dinner, we sat down to do our homework but left the door open.  People kept dropping by:

Jody came in, wearing a spiral-shaped pair of the lovely earrings she hand-made from wire.  She politely asked if we had any yogurt.  We told her to help herself.  She ate the yogurt while chatting with the Bagger, then left.

Ann came in and took one m&m from the bowl on my dresser.  She hugged Kevin and asked, "Are we still on for tomorrow night?"  Kevin said, "Sure.  I'll meet you at seven."

Mary came in and took one m&m from the bowl on my dresser and ate it as stealthily as one can.  She was wearing an enormous black trenchcoat and a fedora pulled low over her eyes.  She approached the Bagger, backed her into a corner, and whispered hoarsely, "Would you like to buy a Q?"
    "A what?"
    "A Q."
    "Uhhh...you mean like the letter Q?"
    "Oh yeah.  Great price.  Check it out."  Mary opened her trenchcoat and showed that there was a large Q, cut out of white paper, taped to the inside of it.  She wiggled her eyebrows encouragingly.
    "Ummm...no thanks."
    Mary, crestfallen, fled from the room making sad snuffling sounds.

Shawn came in and took one m&m from the bowl on my dresser.  He went into Kevin's closet and shut the door.

Jody came in, wearing triangular wire earrings and murmuring, "Yogurt.  I must have yogurt."  We told her she was welcome to it.  She gulped down the yogurt and raced from the room.

Lynne came in and took one m&m from the bowl on my dresser.  She leaned into Kevin's lap, gave him a little kiss, and said, "I'm really looking forward to tomorrow."  Kevin said, "Me too.  I'll see you at eight."

Mike came in, took one m&m from the bowl on my dresser, and asked if Shawn was in his office.  I said yes.  Mike knocked on the closet door and then stood in the doorway arguing with Shawn about whether or not the Carnegie Mellon Necrophilia Society could qualify for Student Senate funding.  They departed to "examine the evidence more closely."  (Actually, they were going to Shawn's room, one floor above, which was serving as headquarters for all komrades involved in the Operation.)

Approximately fourteen people began dancing and head-banging in the hallway directly outside my room, playing Weird Al Yankovic's "Dare to be Stupid" on a boom box.

Jody came in, wearing diamond-shaped wire earrings and looking crazed.  She dashed to the refrigerator, grabbed two yogurts, opened them both, and sat down on my bed to get her fix.

The resident assistant asked the dancers to stop playing music in the hallway.  They turned it off, and each stopped by my room for one m&m before departing.

Jody's roommate Heather rushed into the room.  "You told me you quit!!!" she wailed.  Jody, quivering violently, protested, "I can stop anytime I want!"  She quivered so hard that a blob of boysenberry yogurt fell onto my blanket.  Heather cried, "You see!!!  You have a problem!!!  You've got to get help!!!"  She dragged Jody away.  Arch and I watched them go, looked at each other, shrugged, and each started eating a yogurt.

Mary came in, looking completely different as she was now dressed in a skin-tight sequined outfit.  She tackled Kevin onto my bed (as I, cleaning up the yogurt, ducked to the floor), and kissed him passionately.  "Oh, darling, I can hardly wait until tomorrow!"  Kevin replied, "I know, but I just can't see you until nine o'clock."  Mary, sighing with longing, paused for an m&m on her way out of the room.

Faye came in and took one m&m from the bowl on my dresser.  She and I gossiped enthusiastically, referring to everyone by their computer network user IDs (rs87, fl0m, am4v, kc2z, and the like) instead of their names.

Fred came in and put a small handful of m&m's into his mouth.  Kevin and I leapt up and yelled, "What's the matter with you?!  How can you be so greedy and rude?!"  Under cover of this uproar, Jody tiptoed in, filled her arms with yogurts, and tiptoed out.  (She took the yogurts up to Shawn's room to share with everybody.)

It was around this time that I realized I didn't have the textbook I needed for the last homework assignment I had to do that night.  I was an architecture major at the time and had left the book in my studio.  I invited Nina to walk over with me and see what my studio was like.  She agreed very readily--probably glad to get away from the craziness.  The moment the elevator doors closed, she asked me, "Is Kevin gay?"
    "What?  No.  Why?"
    "Well, I just thought that would explain why Arch is willing to let you share a room with him."
    "Oh.  No, Arch trusts Kevin.  We're all best friends.  Anyway, Kevin has enough girlfriends to keep him busy."
    "Oh.  Yeah, I guess he does."
We walked over to my studio in Doherty Hall, which Nina noted had an ambiance eerily similar to that of the Wheeling, West Virginia, YWCA.  In the studio, we found that my classmates were taking a study break and had formed the drawing tables into a catwalk, on which they were strutting to the tune of "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred.  (This had absolutely no connection to Operation Confuse-a-Bagger.  They just did things like that every once in a while.)

When we got back to my dorm room, the door was ajar, but the lights were off.  Huh?  I turned on the light and saw
a condom wrapper in the middle of the floor;
another on Kevin's bed, next to my potted plant, which was tipped at an angle with its fronds all askew;
black clothing flung all over the room;
and Kevin lying in my bed, with the covers pulled up to his chest and his shoulders bare, sniveling miserably.

Before I could think what to say, Kevin moaned in his deepest, most miserable voice, "Liz was here.  She...she had her way with me...and your plant.  I...I'm...sorry!  Ohh, why does this keep happening?!"

I didn't even know anyone named Liz.

Nina excused herself to the restroom.  I wondered if she would ever come back.  I sat down next to Kevin and began saying chipper, reassuring things.  He was playing it so well that it took me a minute to feel really certain that this was all part of the game!  By the time Nina came back, Kevin was sitting up in bed regaining his self-esteem and eating yogurt, and I was checking my plant for damage.  Finding none, I gathered up Kevin's clothing for him.  It turned out he was wearing underwear in my bed--thanks, dude.

Well, there were a few other silly shenanigans like the milder ones above, and then we went to sleep.  In the morning, while Nina and I were taking showers, Kevin used my computer to create a document and send it to a printer.  He told us he needed to pick it up on the way to breakfast.  In the computer cluster, he took his document from the print tray and handed it to Nina.  It was a certificate that said, I survived Operation Confuse-a-Bagger!  Nina laughed and said, "I thought something was up!"  She was impressed that we'd gone to so much trouble to make things silly for her.

Over breakfast, Kevin asked me, "Hey, is it okay if I don't move back to my room tonight?  I have to write this paper, and--"
    Nina interrupted, "You're moving back to your room?  You mean, you're not really Becca's roommate?!"  She had found that part so thoroughly convincing that she figured Kevin had been living in my room for months!

In fact, as it turned out, while Kevin was struggling with a typical CMU courseload (the kind where every time you can see light at the end of the tunnel, a different professor sticks another tunnel in front of you, so you never do get to relax) and so was I, we discovered that we really liked being roommates.  Eventually we decided he might as well stay put for the rest of the semester.  This meant we were prepared for

Part Two: April 1992
I received notification that I was to host another Sleeping Bag Weekend just a couple days in advance.  Not only was I hosting, but I'd been double-bagged: Two Baggers would be staying with me!  KGB knew just what to do. 

The only problem was that I was supposed to work that night, 6pm-midnight, at my job in the kitchen of the Tartan Grill.  I begged my boss to rearrange the schedule, but the best he could do was find someone to cover my first 4 hours; I still had to come in at 10:00 and stay through closing.  Well, at least I wouldn't miss the whole evening.

My Baggers arrived.  Their names were Laura and Jennifer.  Things proceeded much as before: We chatted; Shawn emerged from the closet; we went to dinner with Arch and Kevin, and Kevin was late on purpose this time, for effect; we entertained evening guests including the yogurt addict and Kevin's many girlfriends.  Something new this time was a repeatedly introduced topic of conversation--Which flavor of Kool-Aid best complements which flavor of ramen noodles?--which various groups of people discussed in the style of wine connoisseurs on a very tight budget.  We prepared several samples and demanded the Baggers' opinions.

I was disappointed when it was time to put on my Dining Service uniform and head for work.  I left the Baggers in the capable hands of Kevin and Arch.

While I was out, the komrades up in Shawn's room hatched a plan that never should have seen the light of day.  I'm still not sure what was supposed to be funny about it.  Exciting, yes.  Possibility of getting several people in a lot of trouble, yes.  Funny, no...except in what they did with it after it went wrong.

Drew was a short, skinny, bespectacled guy.  Chris was a big guy with an intimidating leather jacket.  The Baggers hadn't seen either of them before.

Drew raced into my room, clutching his unzipped pants about his loins, slammed the door behind him, and screamed, "Chris caught me with his girlfriend!  Help!  Hide me!!!"  Kevin prudently stuffed him into Shawn's study space in the closet. 

Chris slammed open my door--causing the mirror on the back of the door to fly off and smash against the wall--and bellowed, "Where is he?!  I'm gonna kill him!!"  He yanked Drew out of the closet, and in the ensuing struggle, a very realistic-looking fake gun fell out of his pocket.

Arch remarked helpfully, "I think that's a real gun!"  Chris grabbed it, waved it at Drew, and dragged him away to the stairwell (back to Shawn's room) while the terrified Baggers gaped in horror.

Then the fire alarm went off.  (This had nothing to do with KGB.  The dorm fire alarms were always going off due to idiots trying to cook Rice-a-Roni in a popcorn popper and that sort of thing.)

Kevin and Arch attempted to lead the Baggers out of the building, but Jennifer was nearly paralyzed with fear, and Laura was shrieking about how outrageous it was that she should be subjected to such behavior and how she was going to call the housemother on us.  (She was from a ritzy boarding school.)  They finally got into the stairwell at just about the same time as the gang from Shawn's room, who had delayed a bit in hopes that the Baggers wouldn't see all of them together.

Shawn found himself between Ann and Lynne, two of Kevin's "dates", so he flung an arm around each of them and gave the Baggers a big smile.  They were Not Amused.  Seeing Chris and the obviously-unharmed Drew standing right next to several other players from the evening's escapades made it obvious to Jennifer that she'd been played for a fool.  Laura already had figured that out and was furious.

Yet somehow, in the remaining hour or so before I got home, they all pulled together and devised a new plan: Operation Confuse-a-Becca.

I returned to find my dorm floor in silence and my door closed.  Had they gone to bed already?  I opened the door across carpet covered in broken glass.  I had just time to see that Jennifer was pink-faced and shaking, apparently crying, and that Kevin and Arch were looking guilty and worried, before Laura flew at me screaming angry rhetorical questions: "How could you leave us alone in this terrible place?  Guns! Fires! Sluts!  Why would we even consider coming to school here?  What were you thinking, leaving us with these awful men who did nothing to protect us?  And you don't even have housemothers??  What kind of place is this?  How could your parents let you come here?  WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?!?" 

I managed to stammer a few questions about what had happened, and Arch and Kevin attempted some vague explanations--I understood that somebody had threatened somebody with a gun, that the fire alarm had gone off, and that there was some kind of sex scandal--but we all were being drowned out by Laura.  She was so upset that I figured this gun thing (the only unusual piece of what I was hearing) must have been serious, and also I could see the broken glass; something terrible must have happened, but what, why, and was it really only part of Confuse-a-Bagger??  I don't handle being yelled at very well, and just as I was reaching the point of collapse, my darling boyfriend brusquely brushed past me and disappeared down the hall, abandoning me!

"Why aren't there any adults on this campus overnight?" Laura demanded in a particularly nasty voice, and I got defensive.  I snapped, "We are adults, and what responsible adults"--pointed look at Kevin--"do in an emergency is call the police, and it just so happens we have an on-campus police force available all night!" 

I reached for the phone just as it rang.
    "Campus Security," said a firm male voice.
    "Oh, thank goodness!  I just got home, and there's been some sort of--"
    "We heard a report of a conflict involving a deadly weapon."
    "I don't know exactly what happened, but I think it was a joke, and--"
    "A JOKE!  I assure you, young lady, violations of the firearms code are no joke, and you will be held liable--"
    "But I wasn't even here!  It wasn't my idea!"  (I felt I was blathering on autopilot while my brain argued, "This sounds like Tom!" and my other brain, or somebody, bleated, "Do you know what'll happen if I say, 'Knock it off, Tom,' and it really is Campus Security?!")
    "DO NOT LEAVE YOUR ROOM.  An officer will come to question you."  Click.

I turned, shaking, tears in my eyes, to see Laura watching me like a snake with its prey, Jennifer turning purple and quivering on what now appeared to be the verge of hysterical laughter, and Kevin inexplicably looking out the window.  There was a loud banging on the door.  I opened it.

"Campus Security!" said Tom.  Behind him, all grinning, were Chris, Drew, Arch, Shawn, Ann, Lynne, and several other komrades.  "Operation Confuse-a-Becca!" they chorused.  They crowded into my room, celebrating the success of their plan.  Somebody paid the Baggers' dues for the next year's KGB membership, should they choose to attend Carnegie Mellon.

The aftermath
I collapsed, and Arch caught me.  He had left me in the middle of the crisis in order to run up to Shawn's room and tell everybody to wrap it up quickly because I was not taking it well.  He and Kevin helped me clean up the broken glass while everyone else was oblivious with glee over their great joke.

It was a long night.  I couldn't stop thinking about what might have happened if someone had gotten hurt in the struggle or if Campus Security really had come to investigate.  I couldn't stop hearing the things that had been shouted at me by people who sounded like they meant them.  I woke up shaking, over and over again.

Laura had been accepted into Princeton and probably went there.

Jennifer appeared at Carnegie Mellon in the fall but pretended not to recognize me or any other KGB folks.

Nina, the first Bagger, also came to Carnegie Mellon, and she did attend several KGB meetings, with a small group of her art-major friends in tow.  It wasn't really her kind of thing, but she gave us the old college try.

It took me a good several months to find the last part of this story amusing.  It's not that I can dish it out but can't take it.  It's that there were two different kinds of Confusing: the silly, harmless, geeky kind that attempted to portray our campus life as slightly weirder than it actually was, and the kind where people run around a semi-public building tackling each other and waving realistic-looking weapons and WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING???  If the idea of staging an armed conflict for the Baggers had been discussed in advance, I would have objected based on the possible damage to my room, the odds of getting in trouble for it, and the fact that there's just nothing funny about seeing what you believe to be a genuine fight between angry men with a weapon that could kill you by accident.  I like to think that I would have objected, too, to any plan that involved anybody getting screamed at as if she were in a lot of trouble because of events that were out of her control.  What's funny about that?

In retrospect, though, it's a great story!  The best part is the twist, the point when Operation Confuse-a-Bagger ended and Operation Confuse-a-Becca began.  That was genius.  My friends knew when to quit, how to get two people they'd just met onto their side, and how to turn a failed plan into something exciting to fill the rest of the evening.  Pretty cool.  I must admit, if I had been there when Chris burst into the room, I probably would've jumped up and called a halt to it right then, which might be the safest course of action but would've totally blown the dramatic tension.  So it all worked out for the best.

I still have the potted plant.  Like me, she found the experience traumatic in some ways but ultimately came to believe that it had improved her character and given her an interesting story to tell.]]> links tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-09-17:44279514-c588-4233-b559-9797490c891d EnviroBecca 2008-09-17T11:36:22Z 2008-09-17T12:24:00Z Check the facts behind those negative campaign ads!  This site is like Snopes for politics.

Hey, I never knew this before: Some spiders are indoor spiders who long ago evolved to live inside buildings!

Curvy-hipped women are smarter and have smarter children.

A man whose parents lived with and loved another couple for part of his childhood writes about the experience.  I think the most interesting thing about this is that he says the divorce was harder on him than the cohabiting.

Orson Scott Card wrote this great article about walkable neighborhoods, public transit, and ways to improve retail operations.  He wrote a lot of the things I've been meaning to write (and now don't have to get around to!) as well as some I hadn't thought of yet.  He also makes me grateful for Pittsburgh, where those "little downtowns" are a reality.

Interesting facts about the countries that legalized homosexual civil unions in the early 1990s: Rates of heterosexual marriage increased, rates of heterosexual divorce decreased, rates of sexually transmitted infection decreased, and rates of unmarried childbearing increased at a slower pace than before civil unions became available.

A great reason not to get married, whatever your sexual orientation: In Massachusetts, you can be required to pay alimony to your spouse's ex-spouse!

This local mom has an almost paperless home because of the many reusable products she makes and sells.  I really like the looks of her school-gear bags (intended to replace those horrible zippered vinyl ones whose scratchy seams always split at the worst possible moment), and the unicorn-print diapers are sooo cute!

Here's a place to buy reusable sandwich wrappers that are not made of vinyl.

Walk Score uses an address to calculate the "walkability" of the neighborhood--what's within walking distance.  Our home scores 88 out of 100.  My childhood home scores 23.

The daughter of feminist author Alice Walker writes about how her mother's stances affected her life as a child and now as a mother.

Interesting thoughts on cat-to-human translation and Emotional Dynamic Range.

Here's an old house turned into an eye-popping art project.]]> The Way I Usually Do It tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-09-11:ea081c09-ba70-4436-8224-c994cf035ce5 EnviroBecca 2008-09-11T12:43:50Z 2008-09-11T12:45:00Z
Nicholas said, "Well.  Mom.  This is the way I usually do it."  He grabbed an uncut avocado and began sawing at it with the paring knife, narrating in an instructive tone.

My first instinct was to laugh.  I mean, the kid is three-and-a-half years old and had never cut an avocado before in his life.  What does he know about it?  How can he claim he "usually" does this?  His method clearly wasn't working; the knife wasn't penetrating the avocado at all.

But I know how nice it is to feel competent, to know how to do things and how to explain them.  I thought about how much of my writing is about The Way I Usually Do It and how good I feel when somebody tries my technique and it works for them.  I know how it feels to be in a situation where other people seem to know everything about tasks you've never attempted, and you just want to feel like you can do things, too--and for a young child, the whole world is like that!

So I said, "Oh, that's a different way.  Okay, you cut that one, and I will get this one out of the peel."  Nicholas replied, very cheerfully, "That's teamwork!"

When I was done with my avocado, Nicholas was still sawing at his and had barely scratched the surface of the peel.  I suggested plunging in the tip of the knife.  I suggested that a serrated knife would be better for that type of cutting.  "No no no!  This is the way I usually do it!...but, Mama, could you get it started for me, please?"  I made a cut in the place he was trying to cut, left the knife in it, and gave it back to him.  (Then I got another knife and cut another avocado my way.  We were making large batches of guacamole and beans to last for several meals.)  Soon he had removed the wide end of the avocado and squished its contents into the bowl.  He then picked up the remaining 80% or so of the avocado and tried to squish it.

At this point I realized that my avocado-opening method wouldn't have worked for Nicholas if he'd tried it.  He can't hold an avocado in one hand and the knife in the other!  Just lifting an avocado in two hands is an ordeal when your hands are that small.  There was no way he could squeeze hard enough to get it out of the peel.  He looked daunted for about two seconds, then announced, "This is the way I usually do it." as he rolled the avocado against the cutting board, standing tiptoe on his chair to lean his weight on it, to loosen it from the peel.

One of the most wonderful things about having a child is being able to teach him how we do things, making him one of our family by teaching him our ways.  But it's wonderful, too, to see him figure out things for himself, especially when it spares him the frustration of not being able to do it my way.  If I'd laughed at him and told him he didn't know how to do it...he might have believed me and stopped trying.

Last night, Nicholas and I were playing Uno ("ages 7 and up", ha!) and I played a Reverse card, which causes the direction of play to change: If you were taking turns clockwise, now you go counter-clockwise.  With two players, that doesn't have any effect.  I explained this to Nicholas.  He said, "Well.  What I usually do about that is, you and me reverse.  Get up.  I'll be you, and you'll be me.  No, leave your cards there."  We switched seats and switched hands of cards, and since I had played the Reverse, now it was "his" turn, which is to say my turn.

What a great idea!  It turned "Ho hum, this would be an interesting play if we had a bigger group, but for you and me it might as well be a number card" into an exciting upheaval of the game play.  Later in the game, when I'd had to draw half the deck into my hand because of a shortage of red cards, I was able to play a Reverse and stick my opponent with that huge hand!  (I'm not one of those parents who plays to lose out of concern for my child's fragile ego.)

When I think back to the many hot summer afternoons I spent playing game after game of two-player Uno with my brother, I wonder why we never thought of using Reverse this way!  I guess it's because we didn't have Nicholas around to tell us the way he usually does it.]]> Community Organizer vs. CEO tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-09-10:fd78b931-a721-419b-8af0-0294e1b7999e EnviroBecca 2008-09-11T11:44:18Z 2008-09-10T12:51:11Z Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention mocked Barack Obama's career as a "community organizer" and said that what America needs is a president with "executive experience" who can act as our CEO.  She got a lot of cheers from the party delegates.  Probably a lot of them are (or want to be) CEOs themselves and like the idea of somebody like themselves being in charge.

To me, though, those words pressed completely different buttons than the Republicans intended.  To me, a CEO is someone who makes the occasional important decision but delegates all the hard work to underlings who never get much credit, someone who plays golf a lot and eats fancy dinners on an expense account, someone who runs the business into the ground and then escapes with lots of money while other people clean up the mess.  To me, "executive" means "I think I'm better than you because I wear a tie and never clean my own toilet."

That's not the kind of president I want!  That's very much the kind of president we've had for the last eight years, and it looks like he's going to get away with the golden parachute, instead of being shipped to Iraq to accomplish his damn mission already. 

A CEO has two top priorities: to crush the competition, and to maximize shareholder profit.  I believe that the United States can be a great country without crushing anybody; in fact, we'll be a better country if we think in terms of setting a good example and encouraging other countries to follow, instead of being paranoid that other countries will conquer us if we don't conquer them first.  As for the shareholders, the Republicans like to make it sound as if all Americans will benefit from their policies, but the reality is clear: When Sarah Palin said Barack Obama would raise your taxes, the "you" she was talking about is the richest 5%-25% of taxpayers.  Those are the shareholders they serve, whose profit they want to maximize at the expense of the rest of us.

Some people have suggested that sneering at the "community organizer" is a Republican strategy to be racist and/or classist without coming out and saying so.  Perhaps.  But I think it's less a matter of race or class than of attitude toward the people.  The Republicans want us to fear the outside world and depend on them for protection.  (I think it's hilarious that Rudy Giuliani, notorious for mentioning 9/11 at every possible opportunity, criticized the Democrats for not mentioning 9/11 enough at their convention!)  The Democrats have noticed that, during our eight years of being defensive and offensive, we've been letting our country fall apart on the inside, and they want to get it back together.

To me, a "community organizer" is exactly what we need to get Americans back to feeling like part of a community and getting things organized, instead of spiraling out of control and blaming each other.  I really like the idea of a president whose instinctive approach to problems is to sit down and listen to everybody's perspective and then motivate everybody to stand up and work together to do the right thing.
]]> John McCain is committing adultery. tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-09-10:d6cd1baa-cf9a-4ec4-a08e-3fce1482cb57 EnviroBecca 2008-09-10T11:49:21Z 2008-09-10T12:05:00Z --Jesus Christ, as quoted in Mark 10:11 and Luke 16:18

I'm just saying.  By having divorced Carol and married Cindy, John McCain committed adultery and has lived in an adulterous relationship for 28 years now.  This may not be adultery as your typical American defines it, but it is adultery according to Jesus Christ.

In addition, McCain had several extramarital affairs during his marriage to Carol and began his relationship with Cindy while still married to Carol.  That is adultery by anybody's definition.

It's true that McCain has said the failure of his first marriage was the biggest moral failure of his life and that he's on pretty good terms with Carol.  He could be worse.

But he also said in the above forum, "For me as a Christian, [marriage] is a sacred union. God's in the mix."  This indicates his intention to follow the teachings of Jesus.  How, then, can he believe that his current adulterous union is acceptable?

This isn't the reason I'm not voting for John McCain.  He and I disagree on nearly all the issues of American government that I think are far more important than his sexual behavior.

However, it seems to me that just ten years ago, there were a lot of Americans who thought it was very, very important to have a president who did not commit adultery.  This year, a lot of Americans have been saying John Edwards will never again be able to run for office because he committed adultery.  Clearly, there are people to whom this is a deciding issue.

Therefore, I say: If you believe that an adulterer is unfit to serve as President of the United States, do not vote for John McCain.  If you believe that McCain's adultery no longer matters because he is now (as far as we know) in an exclusive relationship with Cindy, compare the behavior of this self-professed Christian to the teachings of Jesus Christ.]]> Show. No. Fear. tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-28:fbddc7fb-7581-4ec1-85ff-e0915b5f812c EnviroBecca 2008-08-28T12:32:44Z 2008-08-28T12:49:00Z
Now that I have a young child myself, I'm understanding better what she meant:  When he freaks out, I feel afraid--that he'll hurt himself, that he'll hurt me, that people who see us will think I'm a bad parent, and most of all that if I force him to do something I'll damage him--but showing him my fear won't help either of us. He needs me to keep myself together and show that I know what to do in this situation that's freaking him. He also needs me to control my fear because fear leads to anger, and my getting angry isn't going to help, either.

As a developmental psychology major, I learned about the four styles of parenting. I was raised by authoritative parents. I remember many, many times when they firmly directed me to do something I did not want to do, but within minutes or hours or days I realized that their judgment was better than mine. (That's not to say they were always right, particularly as I got older, but they were usually right, which led me to trust them.)

It's unfortunate that the researchers who named the parenting styles chose two terms that sound so similar, because there is a big difference between authoritARIAN and authoritATIVE. The authoritarian attitude is, "You must bow to my will always, because I said so, or else I will make you regret it." The authoritative is, "Sometimes it is necessary that you do what I say, even if you'd rather not, because my wisdom and experience give me better judgment, and in time you'll see that I am right."

Fear has its place. I am afraid that my child or I might get hit by a car, and that's a reasonable fear when we're walking near traffic. While I don't want my child to be crippled by fear in his life in general, I do want him to be afraid of things that are truly dangerous. I'm teaching him to fear cars but also to manage that fear the way I do: by being careful to stay out of the way of cars, following pedestrian safety rules, and trying to interpret the intentions of drivers. I've allowed him much more opportunity to walk (rather than be carried or strollered) near traffic, from an earlier age than many kids these days, to help him develop these skills and build them right into his understanding of how to get around in our world.

I often hear, in discussions of positive discipline, that people don't understand how a parent can never spank a child because you just have to spank in certain situations--and the most commonly cited example is a child running out into traffic. After rescuing your precious child from his brush with death, they say, you must spank him to teach him never to do that again. This is a classic example of showing fear in the the wrong way. The parent's fear for the child's safety is escalated into anger ("I told you not to do that! How dare you disobey me? I'm your mother!") and the child learns not to fear cars but to fear the parent and the pain she inflicts.

Well, one day Nicholas ran out into traffic: He jogged confidently into a crosswalk as soon as the light changed, not having noticed the driver talking on a cell phone and signaling for a left turn.  She also started moving as soon as the light changed, heading right for him. My reaction was to scream and grab him and drag him onto the sidewalk and point to the obliviously departing car as I shook wordlessly.  Then I explained, "She wasn't looking. She almost hit you! Oh, I'm so glad you're safe!" After many hugs, I reminded him that even when we have the right of way, we have to beware of cars that might break the rules. Although Nicholas thought I was over-reacting ("The car didn't even touch me, Mama! I think she did see me."), he did understand my concern. I don't see how spanking him would have helped.

So it's not that a parent must never show fear of anything. What "Show no fear." means is this: Don't show your child that you're afraid of her, afraid that her behavior will ruin everything. That gives her too much power. Not only does giving your power to your child diminish your ability to take charge, but it's disturbing to the child. She is so small and so freaked out by her big feelings; seeing that her big feelings freak you out, too, makes them seem bigger and scarier. Instead, remember that you know how it feels to freak out, and you know it will pass. Decide what really needs to happen now, make it happen, and let everything else go.]]> Menu Selection System tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-23:b79fee6e-ce1c-4b1b-a0dc-b6108c732746 EnviroBecca 2008-08-22T16:56:22Z 2008-08-23T08:41:00Z
First, have the girls brainstorm menu ideas.  Then, leaders sort out the ideas that are affordable and feasible for the cooking equipment and time available, narrowing it down to two options for each meal.  (If you have been with the same troop for a while and have a good sense of what they like to eat and what kinds of cooking they like to do, you can skip the brainstorming part.)

Write the two possible menus for each meal on a sheet of scrap paper: one option on the left, one on the right.  Tape these sheets on the wall in a stack such that one meal at a time is visible.

Present the choices for one meal.  Call on girls for "discussion", which means statements based on something other than their personal tastes, for example, "Cereal would be easier to clean up than eggs."  Girls need to raise their hands and listen to the one who has the floor.

After discussion, girls vote.  Tear the paper in half, put the winning choice in your binder, and put the losing choice in the trash.  If girls are evenly split, leaders cast the deciding votes.
]]> Thirty Reasons Why Women Should Have the Vote tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-23:883e9454-baa0-4835-a262-9dde7c8b94cd EnviroBecca 2008-08-22T16:45:58Z 2008-08-23T08:21:00Z Equal Rights Amendment, and one of her organizations decided to make the editorial below part of the program they presented to other women's groups.  It is adapted from an editorial in a suffragist newspaper published in Garnett, Kansas, in the era when women were fighting for the right to vote.  I guess the idea was to remind women of how far they'd come in the past century, commemorate the struggles of our foremothers, and be amusingly quaint.  

They chose me to read this aloud because, at four years old, I was able to read these words (after some coaching on pronunciation and meaning) but still little enough to be cute and to fit into the old-fashioned dress and sunbonnet another woman in the group had made for her daughter several years earlier, and I wasn't in full-day school so was available for these weekday events.  I don't know how many times I presented it, but it must have been at least a dozen.  It was good practice in public speaking, and I learned a lot of history and vocabulary from my mother's explanations of this text.

After I wrote in my previous article that I couldn't find this document online, my mom sent me the text.  The original title is different, but I remember using the title above, which I think is clearer and more persuasive.  Anyway, here it is:

THIRTY REASONS WHY I AM A SUFFRAGIST 
1.  Because in the beginning God said it was not good for man to be alone.
2.  Because it is just as bad for him to be alone at the ballot-box as in the Garden of Eden.
3.  Because if woman was a help-meet for him there, she is equally meet at the ballot-box.
4.  Because women have been rulers in other countries, and why not voters in this?
5.  Because they have been a success as rulers there.
6.  Because they will, we believe, be a success as voters here.
7.  Because, besides being as intelligent, woman is the peer of man in purity.
8.  Because purity and honesty are elements needed in politics.
9.  Because of the class of persons who oppose it.
10. Because gamblers oppose it.
11. Because boot-leggers in Kansas oppose it.
12. Because “who-so-ever loveth and maketh a lie” (not referring to lawyers) is against it.
13. Because I don’t want to be classed with such persons.
14. Because ministers as a class favor it.
15. Because educated men strongly urge it.
16. Because all Christian patriots are demanding it.
17. Because some of our noblest women want it.
18. Because I delight to be counted with these classes.
19. Because “Taxation without representation is tyranny.”
20. Because our fore-fathers fought for that principal.
21. Because it is as much of an honor to fight for it now.
22. Because it is as bad to tyrannize over woman as over a few weak colonies.
23. Because there are many beautiful and smart old maids who will not tie themselves to a man and are thus unrepresented.
24. Because we believe women are less susceptible to bribery and corruption than men are.
25. Because they generally have a mind of their own.     And,
26. because they sometimes have a piece to spare to the man who tries to dictate.
27. Because women are successful in every line of business.
28. Because the present condition of our government demands it.
29. Because it is right.    And,
30. because, in the language of another, “I would rather be right than president.”
]]> More about shyness tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-22:1a2b3350-5326-4450-912a-e360672a9edb EnviroBecca 2008-08-22T16:47:48Z 2008-08-22T12:44:00Z My mother just read my article on shyness and suggested a couple of additions.

One is an anecdote I'd never heard before:

At the last parent/teacher meeting of each elementary school year, your teachers confided how pleased they were that "Rebecca has finally started to come out of her shell." Every year. They were so proud of their good influence. Knowing how calmly you could address a mass audience, I tried not to let my amazement show; and in later years as I kept hearing the same brag, I tried not to snort or contradict them. I knew you were okay, and blending into the wallpaper is a useful skill too.

That's very funny, yet I completely understand what the teachers were seeing: It did take most of the school year for me to feel comfortable enough to participate in class in a normal sort of way.  In junior high, I was in a math class with just 8 other kids, including some of my best friends, and had the same teacher both years, and I remember fondly the day when I had laryngitis and Mrs. Helmer commented on how quiet it was without me!  I'd never gotten a comment like that before!  I remember also an English teacher who wrote a poem about the class toward the beginning of the year, in which the first line about me was, Rebecca S. seldom speaks, but there's wisdom there.  I wondered whether she meant that I had an aura of wisdom despite my few words (cool!!) or that it was wise not to talk too much in the class of a teacher who assigned extra work to excessive talkers!

Anyway, it's amusing that the teachers seemed to think I was blossoming because of something they had done.  I think it was mostly a matter of time.  I can't recall any elementary school teacher doing anything really helpful regarding my shyness with my peers*, and a few of them did the "little talk" that I grumbled about in my previous article.  However, some of my teachers did become grown-up friends who helped me feel that I had allies at school.  I would hang around talking with them when they had playground duty and stay after school to visit them, in some cases for years after being in their classes.

*I have to give credit, though, to the teacher who was unpleasant in many ways but managed to notice that I had not a single friend in her class but did have friends in the other classes of my grade.  She pulled some strings and arranged for all my friends to be in my class the next year!  That was wonderful.

My mom also reminisced about my early public-speaking experience, reading aloud a newspaper editorial titled "Thirty Reasons Why Women Should Have the Vote" to meetings of ERA advocates in the late 1970s, when I was 4 and 5 years old.  That certainly was good practice in being comfortable with being seen and heard by unfamiliar people and in accepting compliments about my precocious reading ability.  I can't recall what strategies I used, but my mom mentioned one that I think is worth promoting to other shy people:

I figured that you must have used a ploy similar to the one I relied on in school: Now I'm not being me, I'm being a Speaker so I'll just act the way a Speaker does. No sweat.

"I'm not being me" is a way of shrinking your self, the self that seems so awkward and vulnerable, to get it out of the way so you can get something done.  People who have never been shy often seem to think that a shy person's problem is a too-small self, a lack of self-esteem and consequent fear of growing one's self to normal size.  But I often felt that being me meant being highly visible to the normal-sized people, an unusually large target, like an elephant among penguins.  Those other kids, the amazingly bouncy talkative ones, must have a compact and non-burdensome self securely tucked in the middle of their big colorful personality, I figured.  I've since learned that some very bold people do in fact have big, cumbersome, trouble-ridden selves (which perhaps they're trying to hide behind a lot of bluster) but my point remains: A big part of shyness is worrying about your self, the way you look to others, the way they could hurt you.  A shy person does not need strategies for making her self bigger; she needs help developing a public persona that works in tandem with her self.]]> Organizing Troop Information tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-20:4c5b9b7a-2d43-4ba0-a97f-9da5fc04144c EnviroBecca 2008-08-20T13:04:42Z 2008-08-20T13:06:00Z This is by no means the only way to organize the paperwork for a Girl Scout troop!  It's just the way I do it.  Apparently some people think I'm good at it, because I've been asked to give a presentation on the subject at an upcoming leaders' workshop.  I hope this system is helpful to other leaders--try it out and adapt it to make it your own!

The most important thing I've learned about organizing my records on individual girls is that putting the girls in alphabetical order by first name makes a lot of sense.  I think of them by their first names, not last names, and in my troop many girls have a parent whose last name is different from theirs, so last names are confusing.  Alphabetical by first name is the order I use for girls' individual forms in each section of my binder, for girls' names on the attendance and dues sheets, for permission slips when I'm checking to see whose have been signed and returned, and for all lists where I'm marking off who's earned a badge, paid a fee, confirmed whether she's coming to camp, etc.  I memorize the list of names (by putting it someplace where I see it several times a day) so that it's easy for me to figure out who's missing when I'm counting heads.

What's in my binder
I keep most of my troop records and plans in a three-ring binder with pockets inside the covers.  I bring it to every meeting and have it handy at home or work between meetings.  Here's how it's organized:

In the front pocket are things I expect to use at the next meeting.  Typically, these include:
  • written instructions for each patrol about what to discuss or do during their patrol meeting
  • a list of things to announce to or discuss with the whole troop
  • kaper chart
  • schedule for the meeting (if it's going to be complex) to post on the wall
  • any other signs I'm going to hang up during the meeting, for example, "Juniors are meeting downstairs in the gym today." or "Don't leave without your permission slip!"--if I've had time to make these signs before arriving at the church!
  • any document I need to give to a particular girl (If I have handouts for everyone, that's too much paper to stuff into the pocket, so I bring them in a separate envelope.)
  • any documents I'm planning to show the girls--for example, at the first meeting of the year, I'll show them last year's troop financial report, which I compiled during the summer.
During a meeting, I stick into the front pocket any paperwork received from girls.  (However, when I'm expecting a large volume of paperwork, I bring a separate envelope to stuff it into.)  Between meetings, I file this paperwork, check off having received it, and enter data into my computer if necessary.  I also put into the front pocket any decisions made at the meeting, such as menus for camp, a patrol's notes on craft supplies they think the troop should have, or the results of voting on which field trips we want to take.

In the binder rings, in front of the first divider, I keep several sheets of scrap paper.  On the first one, I make a sloppy chart (just for my own reference) of who did which kaper each week.  On the next one, I keep a list of who's in which patrol, just in case anybody forgets.  The rest of the sheets are for miscellaneous notes: Who's coming to which event?  Who asked me to get troop numbers for her next time I go to the Girl Scout Shop?  What's Jasmine's new phone number? and so on.

The first divider is attendance.  In this section I keep the Attendance Record (official council form), which doubles as a record of our activities.  I use one column for every troop meeting and one for every special event, in chronological order.  In the bottom of the column (across the check-boxes below the last girl's row) I write what we did at that meeting or event: "Folk Arts #1 & #2" "sleepover; Cooking #5" "Fall Food Share" "Thinking Day" "booth sale" "Sky Search" "camp planning" "Court of Awards" etc.

The second divider is emergency contacts.  I made a form, which parents fill out at the beginning of each year, to present this information with more clarity and detail than is given on the health form.  Based on experience, I made some changes for this year.  It says:

Girl Scout's name:
Who is allowed to pick up your Girl Scout from meetings and events?  (Please include parents here.)
Name    Relationship to girl    Telephone number
[5 lines]
Please sign if you agree with the following statement: My Girl Scout is allowed to leave the building by herself after meetings and events.  Signature:
Is there any person who is NOT allowed contact with your Girl Scout?  Please explain:

I added the note about including parents because many parents thought I meant, "Who other than yourself is allowed to pick her up?" so I had to transcribe the parents' information from other forms onto this one.  I added the part about leaving by herself because once the girls became Juniors, some families wanted them to come out to the parking lot, walk over to the library to meet their parents, or just walk home on their own, rather than require an adult to come in and claim them.  That's quite reasonable for their age, but just to be safe I want to make sure of which girls are allowed to do it.  (In an older troop, if some of the girls can drive, you might want to add a separate line for parents to approve their girl getting a ride home with a friend.)  I added the part about non-contact in case of custody problems and such, although that's never happened in my troop before.

The third section is health forms.  These are the official council forms on which parents provide the girl's health history, doctor's and dentist's contact information, and the person authorized to make medical decisions if parents can't be reached.

The fourth section is finances.  I punched holes in two 7"x10" envelopes.  The one labeled "To Be Deposited" is for checks destined for the troop's account; this keeps me from misplacing them or accidentally depositing them in my personal account.  The other envelope is for receipts. 

Next is a sheet of paper where I track cash spending and receiving in a sort of ledger.  The top half of the page has columns headed:
Date    Paid by    Amount    What for?    Reimbursed
and the bottom half has columns headed:
Date    Rec'd from    Amount    What for?    Deposited
I write all cash transactions in here as soon as possible, before I can forget them!  Then I simply put cash received into my wallet.  If someone else spends her own money on things for the troop, when I reimburse her with a troop check then I write the date in the Reimbursed column.  Every so often, I add up all of my spending from the top half of the page, add up all the cash I received from the bottom half of the page, and calculate the difference.  If cash spent is more than cash received, I write a troop check to reimburse myself.  If cash received is more than cash spent, I write a check on my personal account and deposit it in the troop's account.  I note this in both the Reimbursed and Deposited columns.  Usually I balance the cash only a few times a year, whenever the paper fills up and I'm ready to start a new one.  Sometimes I'll do it when the troop is low on money and I suspect I owe some, or when I've spent an unusually large amount (for example, if I ordered craft supplies and had to pay with a credit card) and want to get that money back.  If your personal budget is pretty tight, you may want to balance the cash more often so that you don't find you owe the troop more money than you have.

Next is the Dues Record (official council form) showing who paid her dues for each meeting.  Our dues are $1 per regular troop meeting attended (no dues for special activities; no dues owed for a meeting you missed) and the girls vary widely in their ability to remember to bring it.  Many of them forget for a few weeks in a row and then bring several dollars at once.  I check off one meeting's box for each dollar paid and mark an X in the box if a girl is absent.  At the bottom of the column for the meeting, I write the total dues actually received, and if anybody brought more than $1 I note her name and the amount with an arrow pointing to the total for the meeting when it was collected.  Dues are cash received, above.

I hole-punch the troop's bank statements and put them in this section of the binder, just in case I or anyone else want to refer to them.

The fifth section is girl records.  These are the official council forms listing a girl's contact information, registration history, and accomplishments.  Although it's tedious completing them by hand, I find it worthwhile because they're so useful as a reference!  When we finish earning a badge or patch, I write it on the record of every girl who earned it.  Then, when we're planning our next Court of Awards, I look at the records to make a list of what each girl earned.

The sixth section is labeled misc. reference, although the only thing I've ever kept in here is the community directory--the contact information for leaders and other volunteers in our region of the city.

The seventh section is Cool Stuff.  This is a council publication listing council-run events that troops can attend.  It also includes ads for local museums and such that offer special programs for Girl Scouts.

The eighth section is training schedule.  The council offers training for leaders to learn the skills we need to take girls to camp, build fires, sell cookies, teach archery, etc.  I like to have the schedule handy in case a parent volunteers to take charge of some activity that requires training or I realize I need to take a new training myself.

The ninth section is misc. forms.  First are extra copies of the forms girls need to fill out when they join the troop, so I have them handy if anybody brings a friend to a meeting.  (The only form I don't keep in here is the actual registration form that goes to GSUSA, because it's a carbonless-copy form that gets messed up by being carried around too much.  I tell new girls that I'll bring these to them at their second meeting, and I put them in the front pocket of the binder.)  Also in this section is most of the sheaf of forms the council sends me each fall in the start-up packet.

The tenth section is document originals.  These are the clean, blank copies on white paper that I use when making copies.  (I print girl records, health forms, emergency contact forms, and permission slips each on a different color of paper so that I can recognize them at a glance and so that I can tell girls, "You need to bring back your blue form.")

In the back pocket are things I may want to use at a meeting but have no immediate plans for.  This includes a list of "fill-in activities" in case we find ourselves with time to kill; most of them are things I noticed in the badge book that could be done on short notice with minimal equipment.  I also carry around the current Girl Scout Catalog in case anybody wants to see it.  The papers on which I wrote what to say in opening and closing flag ceremonies live in this pocket so that I don't have to write it out every time we have a flag ceremony!

What's on my computer
I keep most of my records on paper because I work outside the home and go straight from work to troop meetings, so having stuff on my home computer isn't particularly useful to me.  However, I do maintain a few electronic files for Girl Scouts:
  • basic information on all current troop members: full name, birthdate, school, address, phone number, parents' and emergency contacts' phone numbers and e-mail addresses.  I keep this in a text file, with no fancy formatting, because I've found that easiest to print or paste into e-mail when sharing the information with co-leaders or parents driving carpools.  I just put a row of asterisks between girls.
  • forms and handouts I've made myself.  This includes two versions of a "Welcome to Troop 15!" handout, one for girls and one for parents, explaining all the basic information about our troop.
  • the script for our annual Investiture play
  • e-mails that I expect to refer back to in the long run.  E-mails about short-term issues just stay in a folder of my Webmail inbox, where I can access them from work as well as home.

What's in my closet
I've dedicated roughly half of the top shelf of my dining room closet (which is next to my computer) to Girl Scout stuff.  You might use a drawer or a box or a desktop bin, but you'll want to have some space dedicated to storing Girl Scout things that you don't want to carry to and from every meeting.

Some of the things that live on this shelf are blank registration forms (the carbonless-copy ones mentioned above), a spare volunteer registration packet if I have one, permission slips when not in use (see below), any badges or patches or pins we have acquired but not yet distributed to the girls, our extra checks, the packet of information about our bank account, and a uniform vest I'm going to sell to somebody someday (I accidentally bought too many).

Permission slips
The council offers two options for permission slips: one that covers just one event, and one that lists up to 10 events with numbered lines for parents to sign.  I use the multi-event version because it requires less paper, it simplifies the process when we're doing several special activities in a short time and need to get permission for each of them, and its durable nature encourages girls to take responsibility for bringing it home and back several times.  (We used the multi-event slip when I was a girl, and my leaders conveyed the sense that it was a sacred, crucial thing.  I try to do this too.  After all, photocopying costs money, and misplaced forms are really annoying for everyone!)  I print permission slips on cardstock to prevent them from getting crumpled.

I keep permission slips in a clearly labeled manila envelope.  When we don't need them, this envelope stays home in the closet (see above).  When I plan to hand out, collect, or attend an activity that requires permission slips, I put the envelope into my Girl Scout tote bag, next to my binder.

Archives
I'm not one of those leaders who makes beautiful scrapbooks commemorating troop activities.  I just don't have it in me.  Heck, my only child's baby book is still half blank, and he's going on four years old!  I try to take photos of the girls once in a while, and I save occasional pieces of their artwork if they haven't claimed it, but I treat those like photos and artwork of any other friends rather than filing them specially.  I do, however, maintain 3 Girl Scout folders in my home filing cabinet:

  • "Last Year's Records" holds things I take out of my binder when beginning a new school year: bank statements, receipts, and attendance and dues records.  I keep these for a year just in case the council audits us or anyone asks to see the records for some reason.  I also keep the cookie chairperson's records of how many boxes of each flavor we sold, which booth sale times and locations were lucrative, and how much each girl sold; these are helpful when planning next year's sale.
  • "Curriculum Ideas" holds meeting schedules, patrol assignments, or whatever paperwork I have related to activities that went particularly well.  These help me to repeat the activities a few years later with different girls.  I'm also posting some of the ideas on this site.
  • "Girl Scouts" is a catch-all folder for things like directions to camps and words to songs.
]]> What Do You Reuse? tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-08:00491c83-29a4-461a-8082-a1fc3ddcad57 EnviroBecca 2008-08-08T13:57:17Z 2008-08-08T12:40:00Z

First of all, I want to rave a moment about how glass jars are much better for food storage than plastic containers! We save the jars from peanut butter, salsa, spaghetti sauce, etc., and use them over and over again. They wash so much cleaner so much more easily than plastic, especially with greasy or sticky foods. Things seem to stay fresh longer in glass. The threaded lids almost never leak. My very favorite feature is this: If you put something hot in a glass jar and fill it very full and put on the lid immediately, sometimes it will seal so well that the food stays good (in the back of the fridge) for a couple of months. I'm talking about the jars from spaghetti sauce and such that have a circle that pops up when you break the seal--you can get that circle to pop down again when the jar is full of hot food. I wonder if it's then shelf-stable, like the original food was until opened, and doesn't even need to be refrigerated, but so far I haven't been brave enough to experiment! I love spaghetti and enjoy making my own sauce, but I figure I may as well make a big batch while I'm at it, so keeping it from getting moldy before we use it is an issue.

Glass juice bottles are wonderful, too. I snagged 7 of them during my big recycling project in 2002, and I'm still using them daily for juice to drink with my lunch at work.  Refilling them from a half-gallon pitcher mixed up from concentrate at home costs less than half as much as buying new single-serving bottles of juice.

We reuse various types of food containers to buy food from the bulk section of our co-op (you scoop from a bin into your container, after weighing it empty and writing its weight on the label so the cashier can subtract it and charge you only for the food). It's fun deciding what's the best container for which food. There are products we haven't bought in years whose containers we're still using: raisins in a Maxwell House instant coffee jar, oats in the huge plastic jar that held 4 pounds of generic peanut butter, etc.

I cut up old knit clothes to make hankies. Last time, I was left with some shreds of pretty fabric from the edges, so I used them as cushioning for a gift I was mailing to my mom--rather than wrap it, I just put it in an envelope and stuffed the gaps with the fabric scraps.

Here are ideas for reusing mesh produce bags, remnants of bar soap, extra address labels and other stickers, scrap paper, egg cartons, and unwanted tobacco.

We made our own Christmas tree out of a cardboard box and the green plastic bags the Sunday paper comes in.

We save gift wrap and use it over again. When it has no large areas that look nice, we cut out the best-looking parts to use as gift tags or to decorate plain paper: reused tissue-paper or an inside-out brown bag. (We also have a lot of cloth gift bags that we use over and over, but most of them we made from new fabric. A few were made from scraps from larger projects.)

When Nicholas was a baby, he had hours of fun playing with shaker-toys made from the cardboard canisters with plastic lids that some foods come in, with a bottle cap or something like that inside.

My Girl Scouts designed a restaurant as part of their Cooking badge and held a "grand opening" where we served "free samples" of the foods we'd made. All the dishes we used were food packaging the girls and I had saved, which would otherwise have been recycled or trashed, and which got this one additional use before it met that fate. It was fun seeing the variety of dishes we collected and deciding which was best for what food!

I save business reply mail envelopes that I'm not going to use, and I give one to each Girl Scout patrol (small group within the troop) to collect their dues money. Each girl writes on the envelope her name and how much she paid. That way I just toss the sealed envelopes into my bag and don't have to count the money until I get home!

The thin cardboard boxes from cereal and other foods are great material for making name tags.  I like to start the first Girl Scout meeting of the year by setting out some boxes, scissors, a hole-puncher, a ball of string, and markers, and telling the girls, "Make name tags."  They figure it out and feel pretty clever!

When we moved, I bought new pink dishcloths to match our new kitchen and demoted the old ones (green and other colors) to bathroom cleaning cloths. As they get worn out, they become "rags" that get one last use for some yucky job and then get thrown away.

We use produce bags over and over again until they tear or something gets moldy in them. After using the produce, we put the bag into one of our canvas tote bags that we use for grocery shopping so that we'll take it back to the store next time.

We use bags from bread, etc., to store various foods and just keep shaking out crumbs, rinsing or washing if necessary, and using them again.

Family-size yogurt tubs have a bunch of uses: buckets for outdoor play, temporary plant pots, bath toys, diluting the vinegar to wash my hair, soaking cloth pads or bloodstained hankies in cold water, soaking other stained items in Oxi-Clean, mixing up wonder-cleaner, rinsing the bathtub after scrubbing.... We keep a yogurt tub next to the sink as the compost bucket (temporary storage of food scraps destined for outdoor compost bins) and keep washing and reusing it until something gets really yucky in it or it's stained by coffee grounds, and then it gets recycled.

We save take-out soup containers, similar to yogurt tubs but clear, to bring home leftovers from restaurants. In a pinch, we use yogurt tubs for that purpose and tape on a label to show it's not yogurt in the fridge.

We prefer paper milk cartons to plastic jugs because the milk tastes better and we've read that milk in an opaque container retains more nutrition. After finishing the milk, we rinse the carton, open the top all the way, and set it on the floor next to the kitchen trash. Non-compostable food scraps go in there, and the carton then gets folded shut so the food won't leak into the trash bag and make a mess when the trash is carried out.

I've made some unique fridge magnets by cutting amusing panels from comic strips and gluing them to magnets. There are two ways to do it:
  1. Take a flexible magnet with an ad on it, which is at least as big as your cartoon. Remove (or at least degloss) the ad with nail polish remover. Let dry. Use white glue to stick cartoon to magnet. Let dry. Cut off any excess magnet. Coat top surface with clear nail polish.
  2. Glue cartoon to thin cardboard from a cereal box or clothing package. Let dry. Coat top surface with clear nail polish. Hot-glue or rubber-cement back of cardboard to a small round or bar magnet.
Here are some links to other people's creative reusing ideas:
Turn plastic shopping bags into yarn for craft projects!
Turn an old coat into teddy bears.
Make paper mache out of cardboard egg cartons.
]]> Some Word Games tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-06:efa4ab0e-69aa-487e-a429-aca1b37e5333 EnviroBecca 2008-09-11T11:45:07Z 2008-08-06T12:03:00Z train station, we stopped at an Iowa truckstop restaurant called Gramma's Kitchen.  One of the puzzles on the children's menu was this: "How many words can you make out of the letters in GRAMMA'S KITCHEN?"  I glanced idly at it and thought, gram . . . ram . . . am . . . mask . . . ask . . . skit . . . kit . . . it . . . hen . . . and then I was hooked.  I grabbed a crayon and spent the rest of the meal covering the page with words.

Suddenly, a whole new vista of puzzling is open to me!  I can take any phrase and amuse myself for 40 minutes or so finding all the words in it.  It makes me feel so clever!  It's probably good for my brain, too.  Research studies have found a correlation between language-related hobbies (like doing crossword puzzles or writing poetry) and reduced risk of Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of dementia.  [Oh, go look them up.  I don't have to provide links to everything!]  In general, "exercising" your brain by doing stuff with it helps to form and maintain connections between neurons, which might prove useful someday.

I've explained how making up rhymes saved my sanity as a new mother.  Daniel and I retained the habit of singing phrases to the tune of "When You're Happy and You Know It" or "The Farmer in the Dell" or "London Bridge is Falling Down" or other songs that we notice fit the rhythm of a phrase, and Nicholas quickly picked up on this.  One day last fall, we walked into the lobby of his preschool and were assailed by dueling stenches: the decaying jack-o'-lanterns, and the lollipop-like chemical air-freshener that had been sprayed on them.  I explained, "They made a smell to cover up the smell, but that just made it worse!"  Nicholas immediately sang:
Oh, they made a smell to cover up the smell,
But I think it isn't working very well!
and then, in the proud tradition of his forebears, he paused to seek lyrics to the "when you're happy and you know it and you really want to show it" part, found none, and filled in, "Doopty doopty doopty doopty..."  It was very funny, but it also led me to realize that this lame in-joke between my geeky life-partner and me had been teaching our child to recognize rhythmic patterns in language!  This surely will be useful to him in later life as he goes out into the world to...umm...write sonnets, or something.

Well, maybe he'll impress future job interviewers with his bagel songs.  Experience with rhymes helps kids learn to read, because they quickly pick up on the fact that words with similar spellings have similar sounds.  (Sometimes.  English is tricky that way!)  Nicholas began to recognize this a few months ago and to point out "matching" words in familiar books.  He now asks us to "save some words for me!"--follow the text with a finger while reading and pause for him to say an occasional word.  Of course, he's much more likely to be accurate when he's heard the story so many times that he's practically memorized it.  But I've found that, even when reading a book for the first time, he can guess the word from context if it's forming a rhyme.

This reminded me of a game my mom used to play with me, which Nicholas will be ready to play pretty soon: Word Star.  Draw a five-pointed star, and in the center write the ending letters of a word, for example, ar.  Now write a letter or letters in each point that will form a word when combined with the ending:
st+ar=star
b+ar=bar
c+ar=car
What about d?  No, dar is not a word.
e+ar=ear.  Hey, that's funny!  Ear doesn't rhyme with star, bar, and car, but they are spelled the same way!
f+ar=far, and our star is filled.  What should we put in the next one?

My cousins Sarah and Simcha, for some reason they never explained, decided to learn to sing "The Red River Valley" with the words one syllable ahead of the tune.  Think about it for a minute.  (You have to know "The Red River Valley", or this just won't work at all.)  Like this:
True from this valley they say you are go.
Ing we will miss your bright eyes and sweet,
Smile for they say you are taking the sun...
etc.  Really demonstrates how tunes aren't connected to songs just by somebody deciding to sing them and getting enough people to sing along that everyone decides it sounds normal, but by the tune being structured the same way as the words.  Break that apart, and it sounds like nonsense, even though the words are still in order.  What particularly boggles me about this game is how difficult it is to do the same thing with another song.  After 20 years*, I still haven't found any song I can slide off its tune like that and still manage to sing all the way through; I just bog down, feeling like my brain is caught in alien machinery.  I don't know if this means that there's something unique about "The Red River Valley" or that I'm just a staggeringly unmusical person who isn't up to such challenges.

*No, no, I haven't been working constantly at it for 20 years!  I only think of it once in a while.  Like every time I hear "The Red River Valley".  Which is not very often.

One morning, in the era when Nicholas demanded nightly readings of The Cat in the Hat, we were having trouble getting out of the house on time, and for some reason I thought it would be fun to say everything in the rhythm of The Cat in the Hat.  It was fun!  Suddenly, instead of plodding toward the bus stop like we do every day, we seemed to be setting off on some sort of zany adventure.  Just from speaking in a pattern of daDAdadaDAdadaDAdadaDA and rhyming every line!]]> Calming Chaos tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-04:fcbbabc5-244e-45a1-8a54-2cbd2bcef404 EnviroBecca 2008-08-06T14:47:18Z 2008-08-04T23:16:00Z
Always have a start-up activity that girls can do as soon as they arrive, even if they're a little early. One leader should be in charge of the start-up activity while the other(s) prepare for the main activity or talk to parents. A start-up activity can be singing, playing a game, brainstorming (ideas for field trips or something like that), reading a story aloud, or a simple craft. (Leaders of other troops have advised me that an active game burns off energy so girls are calmer for the rest of the meeting...but that did not work with some of my girls; it revved them up, and then they wanted to play active games for the whole meeting! I guess it depends on the troop.)

For Brownies, consider a ritual to start the Brownie Ring in a quiet, listening mood. You might have the girls form "gates of silence" and walk through them, have a flag ceremony, or hold hands and walk in a circle saying this rhyme (from the 1970s handbook):
Round and round and round about.
Take the hand of a Brownie Scout.
Here we are in a Brownie Ring.
We are ready for anything!

Whenever possible, break into smaller groups that work separately on the same activity or rotate through several short activities. This helps everyone keep focused and makes it clear who's in charge of whom. With Daisies or Brownies, or if the activity is complex, each group needs to be run by one leader or helper. Older girls can work in a group on their own, with a leader just checking in every few minutes. Either draw names to assign groups or pre-assign groups so that troublesome pairs are separated; if you let girls choose their own groups, they may be rude about excluding somebody, and those who choose to be together may be more wild together than they would with girls they don't know as well.

Be firm about your expectations. When taking field trips, in particular, clearly explain the appropriate behavior before you arrive at your destination.

Use the Quiet Sign frequently. Resist the temptation to raise your voice to be heard. This is difficult but pays off, as girls start shushing each other so they can hear what you're saying. If you find that everyone is doing the Quiet Sign except for one girl who's chattering obliviously, say in your nicest voice, "When Ashley stops talking, we'll be ready to go!"

When there's a lot of interrupting and/or girls raising their hands wanting to talk, use these three lines:
  • "Keep listening, and I'll probably answer your question."
  • "Do you have something to say about [the topic]?"
  • "We are not talking about [tangent] now; we are talking about [topic]."


Discourage the idea that every girl is entitled to voice her opinion in full about every single topic that comes up. Unless your troop is very small, that results in "all talk and no action" meetings. Instead, say something like, "Let's hear three different ideas for the service project. Jasmine?... Okay, Mandy, do you have a different idea?" Start by calling on the girls who are first to raise hands, but then call on different girls each time...but don't feel compelled to ask for input enough times that everyone gets a chance every meeting; just try to balance it over time.

Invoke the Girl Scout Law: "Ashley! That was not Friendly and Helpful! Show us how to do it the right way."

Resist the temptation to chitchat with co-leaders or parents. Stick to talking about business that really needs to be discussed right then, and try to leave the random conversation for another time. This frees your attention for the girls and prevents you from giving them the impression that it's okay to chitchat instead of participating in the troop's activities.

Don't be afraid to discipline (i.e. give firm guidance to) other people's kids, even when their parents are present. Remember that you are the LEADER: You know how to do these Girl Scout things, and you're here to teach the girls how--all the girls, not just those unaccompanied by their parents. I've learned that leaders whose daughters are in the troop often struggle to balance their parent role with their leader role, and thus they appreciate having someone else "lead" their daughter.

Don't allow more than two girls to go to the bathroom at once, and tell them to wait until after the business part of the meeting unless it's an emergency.

Plan clean-up time into the meeting; don't try to do it after the closing circle. Girls and parents see the closing circle as the clear end to the meeting (particularly if the time is close to the meeting's stated ending time) and will go home immediately, leaving those unlucky girls whose parents are running late or are leaders to do all the clean-up every time. That's not fair! Even if you are running behind schedule, insist that at least the most crucial cleaning be completed before the closing circle.

Have a structure for the time immediately after the meeting. Be very clear about the rules for departure (if girls must stay until claimed by their authorized adult, then they need to stay in the room where leaders can see them, not follow their friends out the door) and what girls may do while waiting for their parents. You may find, particularly if the meeting's activities involved sitting still and being quiet, that the girls totally flip out the moment the meeting ends and start running around and screaming! "Use your quiet voice. No running in the building."  If misbehavior is a persistent problem, you may need to plan an activity to keep girls busy until their parents arrive.

When you've tried everything you can think of and just don't know how to get your troop under control...ask the girls! "We have a problem. Sometimes girls are so noisy and distracted that we can't get any fun stuff done! It seems like we spend the whole meeting trying to calm down. What can we do?" You may be surprised at how well the girls, even young ones, can think of solutions that will be effective with them. Your troop may have its own cabana bench waiting to be discovered!

]]> Supermarket Field Trip tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-01:6042d0ed-9c78-44de-9c6a-6a3bb1534d51 EnviroBecca 2008-07-31T14:11:32Z 2008-08-01T12:42:00Z
Divide into teams of 3-5 girls and 1 leader/parent. Assign each team a general category of nonperishable food: canned vegetables, soup, boxed meals (mac&cheese, etc.), fruit juice. Give each team $5 of troop money to spend. Go to the supermarket.

Each team tries to get the best value for the money, considering both price and nutrition.

Back at the meeting place, give each team a turn to explain to the whole troop how they decided what to buy. Donate the food to a foodbank.

This was a fascinating activity! Teams debated whether organic food is worth extra money, whether something on sale far below its normal price is better than something normally sold at that low price, whether protein is more important than vitamins or fiber or low fat, and whether we should buy ingredients we don't know how to pronounce. The juice team learned that a single bottle "may contain" juice from 10 countries on 4 continents. The boxed meal team learned that the cheapest mac&cheese in our store is far healthier than the second-cheapest. The veggie team learned that some canned veggies have almost no vitamins. The soup team learned that one can of soup may contain the Daily Value of sodium for an entire day.

As a warm-up to this activity (while we were waiting for everyone to arrive so we could walk to the supermarket), I showed the girls some pages I'd pulled from the coupon supplement of the Sunday paper, advertising new food products. We talked about how clever wording is used to trick you: "yogurty coated fruity flavored snacks" may contain little to no real yogurt or fruit; the word "beverage" usually means "with a bunch of other stuff thrown in."

The following week, two third-graders dashed into the meeting yelling, "Ms. Stallings! Ms. Stallings! Look at this!"  Earlier in the afternoon, one girl's dad had bought them drinks from a vending machine; one chose root beer, but the other chose lemonade because she thought it was healthier.  Comparing the labels, they'd learned that the lemonade actually had more sugar than the root beer, "and lemons have lots of Vitamin C, right? But this lemonade has zero percent Vitamin C! So there can't be very much lemon juice in it!"  This was my opportunity to explain that ingredients are listed in order of the amount included.  Lemon juice was near the bottom of the list.

Two years later, I am still hearing from parents how their daughters now read food labels and compare prices! ]]> Consumer Taste Test tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-01:7bc21246-c005-448e-b01b-4df5864cf856 EnviroBecca 2008-07-31T13:51:21Z 2008-08-01T12:33:00Z
Choose two kinds of food that are available in several brands and require minimal preparation. We picked O's cereal and applesauce. (One thing we learned was that brands of applesauce don't vary much...but that's why we need not fear trying new brands to save money!) Our rule for the cereal was that if you put milk on one brand, you had to put it on all brands.

One leader buys 3 different brands of each food, removes the labels or puts them into plain containers, and labels them X, Y, and Z. She makes a key showing which brand is which and the price per serving, and keeps it hidden.

Divide girls into two teams. Team One serves cereal to Team Two; then Team Two serves applesauce to Team One. Provide pencils and paper so testers can make notes of their impressions, and water so they can rinse their mouths between samples. For each food, serve Brand X, wait until everyone has finished, then serve Brand Y, wait, then serve Brand Z. Servers may not sample the food until all testers have been served.

After all samples of a food have been served, ask testers to share their opinions. How many thought X was best? Y? Z? Does anyone think she knows that one of the samples is a specific brand? Then unveil the key. Is the most expensive brand the best?

We served the food in tiny dessert dishes from the kitchen of the church where we meet, and the girls took turns washing dishes afterward. They enjoyed the whole elaborate procedure and were very excited to learn which brand was which. The surprise twist was that one brand of O's, although the entire front of the box gave the impression it was "plain" flavor, had added sugar. Most of the testers noticed this immediately; I was summoned from the kitchen with shouts of, "Ms. Stallings, you accidentally bought the honey-nut kind!" When I unveiled the boxes, they set out to read the label and find out what was different about it: "Hey! It says, 'lightly sweetened' in these tiny letters on the back, and it has FOUR TIMES as much sugar as the other brands!!" And the interesting thing was that only 1 out of 9 cereal testers rated that one the best; the others judged it "less oaty".
]]> Troop Budgeting Process tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-08-01:20bff422-e87f-4fc2-a452-92b423d0500e EnviroBecca 2008-07-31T13:43:24Z 2008-08-01T12:21:00Z
Brainstorm some things the girls would like to do that cost money and some things they'd like the troop to own (new markers, a flag for ceremonies, etc.).

Between meetings, leaders research these things and determine what it would cost for the whole troop to do/own each one. Take a bunch of sheets of paper that are blank on one side (old junkmail) and fold in thirds. On the middle third of each sheet, write one activity and the cost.

Bring a set of play money from a Monopoly game or similar.

Divide girls into a few small groups and divide the papers equally among them. Have each group discuss which things are a good value for the money and which things they most want to do/own, and select 5 things to put up for a general vote.

Take the selected papers and set them up as "tents" on a table such that the side with writing is facing the group. (You'll want to seat the girls in chairs facing the table! I had them just standing around, and they all wanted to lean on the table and play with the tents and get in the way of other girls trying to read them.)

Count out in play money the amount of money the troop has. Explain that this is how much we can spend, and we are going to pretend we're spending it on these things. If we don't like the way it turns out, we can pick up some of the money and move it around.

Choose one thing: "It would cost $105 to go to the science center. Is that a good idea?" Moderate discussion for a minute or two, then call for a vote. If a majority of girls vote for it, put that amount of money on the table in front of the tent and go on to the next thing. Make change from the "bank" as needed.

When all the money is gone, ask if the girls are satisfied with this spending. If not, what would they like to change? Shuffle the money around until everyone agrees or you're out of time.

This was noisy but worked extremely well! Girls were very sensible about choosing lower-cost activities similar to pricier ones. They agreed, for example, that sleeping at the zoo wouldn't be $200 more fun than doing a daytime badge workshop at the zoo and then having a slumber party at the church where we meet. They were thrilled to learn that some crafts that sounded very exciting (such as making suncatchers out of shrink plastic) would cost very little. Most importantly, they saw exactly how much money their hard work had earned and where it was going to go.]]> Kaper Chart tag:blog.earthlingshandbook.org,2008-07-31:8494e9da-5143-45c7-ad19-6db212741242 EnviroBecca 2008-07-31T13:29:52Z 2008-07-31T13:09:00Z
There are many ways to do kaper charts.  Some troops make a permanent chart and put the girls' names on Velcro or something so they can move them around each week.  Some troops don't have a chart and just draw a name whenever something needs to be done. 

What I found simplest and most effective was to write the kapers and the girls' names on a sheet of paper (just scratch paper with something printed on the other side) with a marker, in letters about 3/4" high.  I posted it in a visible place on the wall of the meeting room so that anyone could glance over at it when needed.  I made the chart in advance, usually the night before the meeting.  I used a spreadsheet to show who had which kaper at which meeting so that I could make sure everyone got a turn at every kaper.  Elementary school kids are very strict about fairness!

Girls like to see their own names and know what their role will be, so it's important to have everybody's name on the chart.  After filling all the slots, I'd list all remaining girls as Ready Helpers.  If somebody was absent, a Ready Helper was assigned to that kaper.

These are the kapers we had for a typical Brownie meeting:
  • Quiet Bringer monitors the noise level and starts the Quiet Sign when we get too loud.  Anyone can decide that we're too loud and ask for the Quiet Bringer's help.
  • Promise Leader officially starts the meeting by leading us in reciting the Girl Scout Promise.
  • Treasurer collects the dues and marks the dues sheet.  (Some girls needed help from a leader.)
  • Hostess serves the snack.
  • Assistant Hostess passes out the napkins and any dishes needed.
  • Cup Collector takes the cups or other dishes into the kitchen and pours out any leftovers.
  • Scavenger picks up the trash--both after snack and after any messy activity.  When we planned something really messy, I assigned 2 Scavengers.
  • Bubblers (2) wash dishes and rinse them and put them in the drainer. (Leaders dry and put away dishes after the meeting--we found that some girls did not dry cups well enou