Scholastic Book Clubs & Book Fairs

How I loved the day when these were passed out in class!

Anyone remember these from their school days? Those flyers/order forms from Scholastic that teachers used to pass out with all those books?

I’d forgotten about these until I came across them being mentioned in the The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, a book I’m reading for book club. The moment it was mentioned I had to look them up online to see if they were still doing it–and they definitely are!

I remember how excited I was when the teacher passed out these flyers. When I was in school, they were the consistency of newspaper–and I’d go through them eagerly looking for a book (or two…or five) to order. I’m sure my parents were absolutely thrilled to see these come home, because it often meant me begging them to get me another book. And most of the time they didn’t refuse (sis and I were a little spoiled, :P)

The best part though was when the box of books came in and the teacher would go through them, call out our names and hand our books out. Let me tell you, it was always agonizing when the teacher would wait until the very end of the day to pass them out. You got to see that box of books taunting you all day. Of course I understand why they did that–we probably wouldn’t have paid attention in class otherwise.

Another awesome event that occured surrounding books was the Book Fair. I LOVED it. My parents would usually give me a small amount of money so I could go and look for whatever books we’d like when it was our class’ day. Of course as I got older, book fairs became less “cool” by the other kids but I still loved them.

Anyone else remember the book flyers and book fairs?

The Good Ol’ Days…Well, Sort Of

I was reading  Lisa and Laura’s fun blog and they posted about their experiences working together as teens. It reminded me of the fun times my own sister and I shared working together while we were in high school and early years of college (which wasn’t all that long ago…although it seems like it sometimes :P)

A little background–I got the job at the office when I was a senior in high school. It was part of a work study program and initially when I started, my job was to take pages of a book and send them through an automatic scanner (they converted books to PDF format and audio books). Somehow, I was considered an amazing employee because of my awesome scanning skills (haha) and eventually they had me work with other minor projects.

My little sister then followed in my footsteps two years later, and because they loved me, they pretty much hired my sister without too much thought. They LOVED her almost more than me. And I loved that we got to work together during the summer when I came home from college.

Of course, being interns, sometimes we didn’t really get much work. At all. So we’d spend a good chunk of the time chatting on AIM, even though we often were only two seats away from each other. Good times.

And then came the actor.

Yes, a minor indie film actor, whose name I can’t remember, was hired.  Being an “actor” I think the guy really thought highly of himself the way he would strut around the office (I’m sure my sister can remember this as clearly as I do). We’ll call him Rico Suave because that’s the sort of vibe he gave off.

Anyway, at the time, the office was too small for all the employees and we were in transition to moving a few office suites down. Because there wasn’t any room for Rico Suave, they ended up moving us poor interns. To the hallway.

It was odd at first, being relegated to the hallway, but in time it became a good place to watch the employees. And my sis and I were placed right next to each other, which could’ve been a nightmare if we didn’t get along so well 🙂 We still talked on AIM all the time. We had a running tally of how many times Rico Suave would strut by in the course of an hour–and nearly ALWAYS manage to come way too close to bumping our chairs, even though the hallway was plenty wide enough for someone to walk by without doing so. I still cannot understand where he would walk–the office wasn’t that big–or why he’d walk SO freakin’ close to us.

Apparently though, Mr. Suave wasn’t all that suave, at least at his job. He  was fired in a month. So we’d really been moved to the hallway for no reason 😛

But in general it was a good place to work. It was a fun office. Sometimes during the middle of the day, they’d fling one of those screaming monkeys around the office.  Our co-workers were nice–I was called “D.Lo” and my sis “C.Lo” because of our last name. They gave us gifts at Christmas and when we left after the summer, they gave us mini mP3 players.  I also remember one time when the parking lot flooded and as my sis and I were wading through the water to our car, my flip flops went floating away. My co-workers never really forgot that…thankfully that was near the end of the summer 😛

Sometimes I miss working with my sister and the laughs we shared about the job. Now she’s getting ready to graduate college and I’m married and working part-time. I selfishly hope that she’ll find a job nearby so we can hang out again–it’s hard being so far away from one of your best friends 🙂 If you’re reading this, sis, I hope you remember those days as fondly as I do!