Man, I hate myself sometimes; or, A Lame (But Nerdarific!) Giveaway

Seriously. I'm a moron.

So I got some more orders of the special we're having -- the one where you can buy the first four issues of SHM and only get charged for three of them. It's doing pretty well.

I have a lot of back issues because I ordered a bunch a while back for a conference I wasn't able to make it to. I was able to wangle the postage with the help of some lovely flat-rate envelopes, so this sale actually still makes some money while offering a bargain.

I fulfilled a few of these special orders a few weeks ago, and noticed with shock that I was down to the bottom of the box with copies of issue #3.

Now, I have a soft spot for #3. The cover photo is one I took myself. It's a picture of a dragonfly, and I took it with one of those cameras where you don't hold it up to your face, you hold it out and look at the lovely screen to see what the picture will look like once you push the dang'd button.

It was a glaringly bright day, and when I spotted a dragonfly settling for a landing among some sharp-leafed plants, I couldn't keep sight of it for long. I couldn’t see it on the camera’s screen. So I held out the camera where I calculated the dragonfly ought to be, and just started clicking away, hoping I'd get one good shot.

My husband, who is much more visually oriented than I am, saw the resulting pictures and confirmed with an unflattering note of surprise in his voice that one of them would indeed be suitable for the magazine.

I was really happy, because I've wanted to have a dragonfly on a SHM cover from the beginning. I think they're the perfect analogy for homeschooling.

I'm taking my information from Insects Do The Strangest Things, a book I haven't read since I was ten, so please excuse any factual errors. But dragonflies, like so many insects, go through a metamorphosis from icky baby grub thing to soaring beauty. After they emerge from their change, they spread their wings to dry. And -- this is the concept that struck me so vividly years ago -- once they spread their wings, they can never close them again.

Homeschooling, right? I don't mean that you can't quit homeschooling once you start, or alter course, or change curricula or teaching style or anything. I just mean that once you've learned that your child's education is in your hands, you can never be the same again -- even if your child goes to school.

I'm partial to issue #3 for other reasons. It's the home of "The Overachieving Homeschooler's Quiz," which I'm conceited enough to laugh at even now, even though I wrote it.

It also has the article "So, How's He Doing?" I got a letter from someone saying that she read it on the magazine's site and was so relieved to see she wasn't the only homeschooler to feel insecure sometimes, she subscribed on the strength of that essay.

In the print version, that article is accompanied by a photo of my son in a nice big climbing tree. See? We go outside sometimes!

And the issue has the first part of a children's adventure story I was able to continue in the current issue and will be going on with for many issues more, though I'm much more nervous about writing for a young audience than I've ever been about the work I throw at their parents.

It's a good issue. It's the one I send to friends and relatives when they want to know what the heck I'm up to these days.

So when I saw that we were low on it, I thought I'd better go ahead and order more. The special is doing well, and I'd like to keep offering it; and this is an issue I'd like to have around, just for my own sake.

So I went ahead and stopped by the printers and ordered a very frugal few copies of it. I figured I'd just keep placing tiny orders as needed, since one of the nice things about my printer is they don't have any minimum order and they don't charge me more per copy no matter how small my order is.

This was Friday. My husband was planning to go out to our storage facility on Sunday, and I told him that while he was out there, he might as well take a look in the boxes of issues #1 and #2 I'd put into storage. There might be a couple of copies of #3 floating around.

I hate myself; and I'm pretty sure I hate you, too, for being able to tell me without reading the rest of this paragraph exactly what happened next. On Sunday, my husband called to report that there was one box full of issue #2, and one full of -- hey! -- issue #3.

"Wait, no!" I screamed. "I put 1 and 2 away! I KNOW it was #1!"

Of course it wasn't. So instead of being wonderfully thrifty and frugal, I'd just spent money I didn't have to (and really needed for other stuff) at the printers'.

Bad word bad word bad word.

"It's not a whole box of them," my husband said. "I mean, it's mostly full, but not completely. I should be able to get it up the stairs alone just fine."

"Stop trying to make me feel better," I said.

So I've just been fuming and muttering to myself about this for the past few days. I tend to remember odd bits of poetry (never a whole poem; that might actually be worth something), and a few fragmented lines popped into my head during one of these seething moments:
 
"Angerman was filled with fury,
He the judge and he the jury..."
 
Which kind of suited the moment, other than the fact that I'm a girl; but it's also kind of sad that not only can't I ever remember a whole poem, I don't always even remember real poems. Because that's not even from a poem. It's a made-up poem from a novel.

(Note to the snark brigade: I KNOW all poems are made up. And you know what I mean, so just cut it out.)

I'll be happy to send a copy of the now-infamous (at least in my house) issue #3 to someone who can tell me where that's from.

Don't post your answer here, please. If you're going to post anything here, please share stupid things you've done, so I can feel a little better about myself.

Send your answer to me at:

deborah @ 2ds dot org