Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe

I had the absolute pleasure of working with a teacher to create these two posters of literary characters for her middle school classroom.  Featured here are Anne of Green Gables and Arnold/Junior from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, two books that she reads with her students.  It was such a fun commission to take!  Thank you so much!

tulip | crop for april

by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

I spent about $30-$35 (depending on the retailer) for a 40lb bag of this stuff and it lasts me 2 months with a 60lb dog.

Beef Meal, Peas, Ground White Rice, Egg Product, Dried Yeast, Rice Bran, Chicken Fat (Preserved With Mixed Tocopherols), Pea Flour, Dried Beet Pulp, Natural Flavor, Flaxseed, Potassium Chloride, Salt, DL-Methionine, Choline Chloride, Taurine, Dried Chicory Root, Kale, Chia Seed, Pumpkin, Blueberries, Oranges, Quinoa, Dried Kelp, Coconut, Spinach, Carrots, Papaya, Yucca Schidigera Extract, Dried Lactobacillus Plantarum Fermentation Product, Dried Bacillus Subtilis Fermentation Product, Dried Lactobacillus Acidophilus Fermentation Product, Dried Enterococcus Faecium Fermentation Product, Dried Bifidobacterium Animalis Fermentation Product, Vitamin E Supplement, Beta Carotene, Iron Proteinate, Zinc Proteinate, Copper Proteinate, Ferrous Sulfate, Zinc Sulfate, Copper Sulfate, Potassium Iodide, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B1), Manganese Proteinate, Manganous Oxide, Ascorbic Acid, Vitamin A Supplement, Biotin, Niacin, Calcium Pantothenate, Manganese Sulfate, Sodium Selenite, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Vitamin B12 Supplement, Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin D Supplement, Folic Acid. Contains A Source Of Live (Viable), Naturally Occurring Microorganisms.

girl scouts selling cookies

garbage disposals

regular school assemblies 

PSAs

cheerleaders

serious school sports teams

Are you the kind of person who is good with shopping at thrift stores? Or at secondhand shops, or consignment stores, or similar places?

Are you okay with doing your shopping online?

then kindly allow me to recommend a site for you.

thredUP is an online thrift store I found a while ago when I was going through old Ask a Manager columns; the woman who runs that site endorsed them as a place to build an office wardrobe cheaply. Boy howdy, she wasn’t kidding. ThredUP sells women’s clothes, and to a lesser degree kids’ clothes, at heavily discounted prices. The stuff is all secondhand- used or very close to new. Some of it is stuff that was returned to the store, I think, or just sold off by the store to get it out of their inventory. I’ve bought a few shirts from them that arrived with the tags still attached. I actually recognized the brands they were selling, too- I didn’t shop in the designer section, but I still wound up with brands I’d seen for sale in Macy’s at prices that were the kind of thing I’d expect at TJ Maxx or Burlington Coat Factory.

When a shirt would cost me $80 at its basic list price, or $45 at its probable sale price in my local department store, but runs for $10.99 instead at a place like this, I am MORE THAN WILLING to ignore the fact that it probably belonged to someone else first. 

There’s a plus size section, which goes up to 5X. There’s a shoe section; if you’re willing to buy shoes without trying them on (this is always tricky for me so I haven’t tried their shoe selection yet), they go up to women’s size 12. 

Obviously the selection kind of depends on what’s been sold to them recently, but if you’re in a situation where you need to get office clothing together in a hurry on a limited budget, it is entirely possible to secure five reasonably good new or nearly new shirts for the kind of price you’d ordinarily be paying for just one. Throw in a couple of good pairs of trousers at a quarter of the store price, or skirts, and you’re set.

One caveat: thredUP doesn’t have a men’s section. Not sure why, but specialization happens, I guess.

their jewelry section is also HUGE and a little hard to sort through, but definitely worth a little time (lookit my snake ring!)