EtsyBloggers Blog Carnival #2 for Aug. 28, 2009

Back to school. What a loaded phrase! After so many years of detesting those dreaded words, they finally dwindled into obscurity after college. But this year they took on another meaning as I was cleaning out our spare room. I stumbled across all of these old school supplies that had never been used, but we had been lugging around from apartment to apartment to house over the years. I decided I should donate them to someone who could use them - part of my "big clean" mentality that went beyond the spare room. I had been collecting tchatchkas of all sorts from all sorts of places, and it was time to streamline my life. So I ransacked my pen collection that I had amassed over the past 15+ years from various vacation spots. Just a ridiculous number of them. They weren't doing me any good, but what kid wouldn't love to do their homework with pens adorned with Mickey Mouse or Disney princesses or the Texas state flower?

So now all I had to do was find the right place to take my pens and college notebooks and lined paper. But at that point it was evening on a Saturday, and nowhere that came to mind was open. So I popped online to decide where to go the next day. Imagine my frustration when every place I researched insisted on "new" item donations only. Or money. Then I remembered those commercials from "Sleep Country USA" - they accept donations of school supplies at all of their stores.

But instead of going straight there, I stopped by Target. I don't know if it was my love of shopping, the crazy-cheap prices (24 cents for a box of crayons???), the fact that my sister-in-law was pregnant, or that I wanted to be. I bought two of everything, and stuffed it all into two backpacks - one collection slightly more feminine than the other. It's amazing what $30 can buy in the back-to-school section of Target. So I put together the backpacks, and quickly grabbed my old-yet-unused school supplies that were just an afterthought at this point, and headed out to my nearest mattress discount store.

Walking in with my booty, I became nervous about the remnants of my ransacked pen collection. What if the lack of pretty packaging kept them out of the hands of those Disney-loving kids? After a quick discussion with the guy behind the counter, we decided that if the powers-that-be decided my pens weren't good enough for the kids, at least they could be used in some office somewhere. So I put everything on the counter, gave it one last look, and walked out. Kind of anti-climactic after the soul-searching required to give away those pens. But there was some relief to have them gone. And the excitement that some lucky kids were going to get those shiny new backpacks.

I think I'm going to make this a yearly ritual from now on. :)