Flower Pens

A couple days ago, I got to drop by student housing to collect my sunflower heads. I was happy to see that all seven heads were intact and ripe for harvest. So not only was this the year that I got the most sunflowers, it was also the first year that I got to harvest them. And I was very pleasantly surprised to see I got a 13 inch zucchini! My previous record was eight inches.

I went home for Thanksgiving and brought my zucchini with me, which we prepared as part of the Thanksgiving dinner. It was kind of cool to actual bring my own harvest as a contribution to Thanksgiving.

My work has given me a little "book" (smaller than a laptop but bigger than a smartphone) which can detach it's keyboard to become a tablet (smaller than a book but still bigger than a smartphone). One day when I had finished charging it, I pulled out the cord but it left the front piece inside the computer. I thought that I wouldn't be able to use my book anymore, and I didn't for awhile, but one day I reached inside my bookbag (works great for both paper and electric books) and pulled out my charge cord for the little computer. That made me wonder, if my book's charge cord was in my bookbag, which charge cord had  been using, and how had it been working? I checked all my electronics and matched them with their respective chargers. I don't seem to have anything missing a charger, so I really don't know where this random charger that worked on my book came from.

When I was in Summer Program, one of the activities we ran had people painting flower pots. We then had them filled with marbles and put fake flowers in them. The flowers were attached to pens with green tape wrapped around them to create a sturdier stem.

At the end of the day, we set the flower pots out on our sign-out table and participants brought them home. But of course a few people didn't want theirs, so they kind of wound up sitting on the table.

One day, we had several people writing at once, and instead of waiting to take turns with the community pen, someone had the good idea of plucking a flower and writing with. it.

Normally, we would run through a good number of pens due to people absentmindedly slipping them in their pockets, or maybe someone might just want an extra pen. But with the flowers, they didn't fit so easily or conspicuously in someone's pocket, and leaving a flower pot empty was too noticeable. So we could count on people "replanting" them, and we never lost a flower pen. As effective and much less aggressive system as that little chain they sometimes put on pens in banks. If I'm ever in charge of managing pens for an organization, I'm going back to the flower pot method.