It reminded me of something that happened mid-year. I was cleaning out a shelf, and I found a surfeit of pencils. So I asked my son if he needed some for school.
"Oh no," he said.
"Really? You don't need them? You still have plenty of pencils from the ones I got at the beginning of the year?"
"No," he said.
"Then how do you get pencils?" I asked.
"Oh," he said, "I just find them on the floor!"
Perhaps your children are not quite as enterprising as my son.
Seriously, I do have money for school supplies. But not everybody does, and if you can't afford them, the beginning of school is stressful. Washtenaw County employees are trying to fill a school bus with school supplies. From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., July 30th-August 3, the school bus can be found in front of the Target store, 3749 Carpenter Road, Pittsfield Township. Supplies will be given to Washtenaw County kids who need them.
If you miss that drive, many of the local shelters collect school supplies (and other supplies too) year-round.
I have an enterprising son, too! He constantly walks around with a pocket FULL of pencils he's picked up off the floor. He will lend them out, but not the better ones, which he saves for personal use. He once told me he was surprised that kids would rather mooch off someone else than bend over and pick up a pencil (my words, not his).
ReplyDelete- YpsiAnon
this would be in incredible piece, but the fateful"O" has rendered this as an unreliable everything, you can't be on a line, the east coast can cry about it and eat their lobster <3
ReplyDelete-enterprising son #1
I refer my enterprising son to the following discussion of being "on line" vs. "in line."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic2342.html
--enterprising son's mother
Or, try this, from Grammar Girl's Regionalisms web site, http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/regionalisms.aspx:
ReplyDelete"In Line Versus On Line
A common regionalism that listeners ask me about is people using the phrase on line instead of in line to mean they are physically waiting in a row with other people. For example, Mary wrote that she read a story in the New York Times describing people standing on line instead of standing in line. She said she's been hearing it more and more in the past few years and thinks it sounds ridiculous, and Julie noted that it's irritating because when someone says they are on line, she assumes they are on the Internet.
There's nothing grammatically incorrect about using on line to mean standing in line; it just sounds strange to people who aren't used to hearing it. From the dialect map I've linked to from the website, it's clear that people who say on line are clustered in New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, possibly Philadelphia. This is a very small but densely populated, media-rich area. The phrase standing on line will probably spread as it becomes widely distributed by large New York television programs and publications and as people travel and move in and out of the region.
A Google search for “standing in line” returns about 37 times as many hits as a search for “standing on line,” so it would appear that for the time being in line is still much more common."