A School Shooting

On October 12, 2007, a co-worker looked outside the office building where I work and noticed many police cars outside the building. Right across the street from our building is a Cleveland school, called Success Tech. We turned on the TV, and TV crews were filming kids standing outside, some in tears, as well as stretchers with the wounded being carried out.

We found out that a 14 year old freshman walked into the school, shot two adults and two students. After police entered the school, he killed himself.

It seems commonplace now to be reading about a student somewhere who is entering a school or college campus and shooting people randomly. It is still shocking news, but seemingly less than it should be.

At Success Tech, after the shooting, they put in metal detectors for anyone entering the school.

Every morning I pull into the parking lot at work and see the kids lining up to get into the school, to go through the metal detector. They are all very orderly. Today I was watching them, thinking this has become their norm, to have to walk through a metal detector to get into their school.

And I thought how completely sad this whole thing is.

$20 for a pair of Tweezers?!!!!

I am by nature a thrifty person. I was raised that way and I have stayed that way.

I have washed aluminum foil to re-use it. I not only cut coupons religiously, but I exchange the ones I don't want with my mother and my friend Sharon. And if a coupon is really valuable to me, I'll email my work colleagues, giving me like 7 total coupons for the same item. I let the weekly grocery store sales dictate what I'll be buying for the week.

So what I paid for a pair of tweezer this week astounds me as well as all who know me.

Daughter Heather was home for the summer. We call her "princess" because she likes the finer things in life, and she really likes having her parents pay for the finer things in life. We are quite happy she is a senior in college so she can start buying her own finer things in life.

While Heather was home, she complained that her tweezers no longer worked, so I told her to get herself a new pair. I'm thinking $5. Well she came home with the most amazing tweezers I have ever used. Tweezerman tweezers. I always thought tweezers were basically the same, but I learned I have been wrong. I am used to trying 5 times to get that one hair. With Tweezerman, you get it on the first try, always. I asked "how much did you spend on these tweezers?" and she said '$15."

I decided my time is worth something, and it is time-consuming to keep missing the same hair. So I went to CVS and found about 10 different types of Tweezerman. The one that most closely resembled what Heather brought home was $20. Yeah, $20! And I bought it! And it has made a major difference in my life!

I went to work the next day and mentioned I had spent $20 on a pair of tweezers. Those who know me and those who are thrifty like me were appalled.

Secretly, I think they might buy these one of these days.

ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS!

And the winners are............


Number one winner: Trish

Number two winner: Anno

This was done thru the random number website that Delaney provided to me (thank you, Delaney!)

As established in the rules, Trish chooses first, then Anno gets the second book.

Thank you to all who entered!

And so today starts year 2 of blogging!