Tatooed-pierce-man to the rescue! Not.

Remember when I told you about my boring errands, namely taking one math book to be spiral bound? How many of you know what spiral bound means? May I see a show of hands? Yes, that's what I thought. It means bound with a spiral, not to be confused with comb bound which is actually bound with a comb-like apparatus which comes apart and turns the comb bound book into a loose-leaf pile of nonsense every time the child turns it inside out upon itself. Now I feel quite confident every homeschooling mom reading this knows exactly what I mean.

We use a math program whose books come comb bound. I despise them. The bindings, not the books. The books are great and that's why we use them. The other day, Adorable turned her math book inside out and the whole thing fell apart. An entire year's worth of geometry lay like pick-up-sticks on the living room floor. So with great haste I gathered it all up and made a command decision: I would have the thing spiral bound.

Off I went to Kinko's, the land of all binding options, and presented my pile of pick-up-sticks now in lesson number order. After much ranting and raving about lousy comb bindings, I convinced the young, tatooed, and multiply-pierced gentleman that I wanted my tome spiral bound. He happily agreed to do my bidding, wrote up the order and told me it would be ready the next day.

I slept well that night with visions of orderly mathematics lessons dancing in my head. And you thought it was sugar plum fairies. HA!

Next day arrives and I gleefully pull into Kinko's parking lot. I swoop joyfully into the store and declare that I am there to pick up my math book. Tatooed-pierce-man happily presents me with a full year's worth of geometry lessons.

Comb bound.

For reasons too numerous to list, I left the store with head hanging low, dragging one foot in front of the other. No swooping. No glee. How do I explain the difference between spiral and comb binding to young tatooed-pierce-man who works there and is supposed to know? *sigh*

Back to my boring errands.

Be thankful ~

Karen