I'm gearing up now for a crazy busy next eight weeks. Our school's annual Wine & Cheese Tasting fundraiser with live and silent auctions is happening mid-March, and I am the Silent Auction Chairperson. Even though the job is high stress, I really like it. I like being all organizey and putting together cool packages of stuff for people to bid on. I like the pressure of it, too, even though it also drives me completely bonkers sometimes (like at 1 in the morning when I'm finishing baskets at somebody else's house and I have to teach the next day).

I'm trying to be more on top of things this year so that when it comes down to crunch time, it's not so, well, crunchy. My students are making a big quilt for the live auction (every class always makes a class project to auction off), and we're working on it now. We actually started working on it in October, and then took a break over the holidays, and now I'm trying to get them working on it regularly, at least a couple times a week. The first year I did a quilt with my kids, we spent the entire month of February working on it, and got almost nothing academic done. Last year, we worked on it a fair amount ahead of time, and then spent the last two weeks doing nothing else, although I did make sure they were at least doing assigned reading and some math. This year, I expect it to be even better. I hope. I may still be finishing the binding on the morning of the auction (as I have done the last two years), but at least the students will have been doing other work at the same time.

I'm also, for the first time, asking for auction donations myself. This is huge for me. I never used to have the self-confidence and groundedness to ask for stuff. I would have cried if people said no, and felt like it was a reflection on me, personally. But now, I can ask for stuff, and if they say no, I just say thanks for your time and move on to someone else.

I feel like I've said all this already here. If I have, I apologize. This is the state of my brain these days. Also indicated by the fact that it took me a good four seconds to figure out how to spell "state." Sigh.