Pens Pens Everywhere

Today's assignment has to do with pens. In many households, there are an abundance of pens that are dried up, don't work or just are not accessible in the place where they are most frequently used. So today, we are supposed to go through and get rid of the dud pens and keep out the stud ones. Slight paraphrase of the assignment, but you all understand exactly what I'm saying anyhow.

Now, a little confession, or actually, maybe a few of them. First off, I am a CNA and as such, I have pens galore. I also have a Tupperware business, as well as a knitting business. Plus, I have an addiction affection for great writing tools AND great writing surfaces. My issue is not so much that I can't find a pen when I need one or that I have old ones that don't work. It's more of the issue that I have pens for different purposes. I prefer a medium gel roller ball pen for writing resident's names on their supplies at work, but a sharpie would work just as well and I have recently taken to carrying one with me at work, following the example of another aide. For documenting, I prefer a fine tip ball point pen (in black ink so that it's legal). For my Tupperware business, I prefer to hand out cheap ball point pens that I get 20 to a package at the dollar store. Hubby prefers a hearty (and by hearty, I mean pricey) gel roller pen.

Then there are the pencils. I prefer mechanical pencils most of the time, although I must confess that sometimes there is just something about the feel and smell of a regular graphite pencil that I find gratifying and inspiring. Hubby prefers the new Sharpie liquid pencils. Once again, a "hearty" product. On the other hand, I have to admit - they are nice and I do keep one on hand to use myself. Natty prefers mechanical pencils over graphite ones and thankfully at this point, he hasn't developed more specific preferences yet. JoNo prefers the graphite pencils and Miss Punky Pie and Boo are willing to use whatever they can get their hands on. Now, if only we could get Boo to realize that toys and walls are NOT the best medium to use for his, ahem, artwork, we'd be set.

Wow. That was a major tangent. All of that to say that what I needed to do was round up our writing utensils and sort them out based on who uses them, where they are used and which item is the preferred instrument. So now that I have done that, I shouldn't have any reason to not have the right instrument at the right time to write with. Okay, the last part of that sentence was totally cheesy, but meh, it's my blog and I'll be cheesy if I wanna. :)

Today's assignment for throwing out old pens, pencils, crayons, etc. was worth 40 points with bonus points for adding the purchase of new ones to the shopping list adding on the potential of an additional 10 points.

Total for today: 50 points
Total for January: 260 points!