Cleaning Aids

"Summer" in my little world means a few very specific things: Sleeping in (6 a.m. walking instead of 5 a.m. Woo Whoo!!!), spending time with my niblets, eating A LOT of snow cones, NOT grading any papers, and currently, cleaning my apartment.

Spring cleaning is usually out of the question for me. Spring is just too busy a time in the world of 'junior high' to spend the necessary hours sorting, scrubbing, and sanitizing the closets, cupboards, and carpets that I use and abuse all school year long.

Please don't misunderstand. I am not a complete slob. I do make little token attempts at cleaning during the year, dusting and vacuuming enough to make my humble habitation livable for me and visitable for my friends. But those half-hearted attempts at housekeeping always pale in comparison to my yearly summer clean-fest.

I recently began just such a scouring spree, only to find my progress stymied by the most surprising of nemesis. Who would dare to stand in the way of my desired state of neatness? My Left-Over Visual Aids, that's who.

Everywhere I looked, stuffed under couches, crammed into closets, hidden behind bookcases, lurked the poster board ghosts of Sunday school and institute lessons past.
Everywhere I turned, they were there. Mocking me with their outlived-usefulness. Knowing full well that, even though I had talked myself into keeping them "just in case" I need them for future lessons, if I ever do think to dig them out again I will decide they are too dusty or poorly colored or not quite clever enough to suit my needs and immediately set to work creating new posters and word strips ... posters and word strips that will eventually join the rest keeping the dust bunnies company in the nooks and crannies of my apartment. It is a vicious cycle... ...a vicious cycle that has led to this. And these are just the visual aids I fished out from behind furniture in my bed room.

My first thought upon rediscovering my various caches of visual aids was that I just needed to bite the bullet and throw them away. Well.... I have to admit that wasn't exactly my first thought. My very first thought was much more prideful, but once I got done complementing myself, my very next thought was that I needed to bit the bullet and throw them away.

But the longer I sat there looking at them, the more I came to realize that tossing all of this hard work and sturdy paper into the trash would just be wrong on so many levels. "Think of the environment!" I told myself. And I did think of the environment. I thought about how "green" it would be of me to reduce my carbon footprint (or card stock footprint, as the case may be) . Then I thought about the economy (or the current lack there of) and told myself that it would be much more responsible for me to find some way to reuse them. So I started brainstorming.

My first thought was that I could use them for redecorating. It made sense: cover the walls of my apartment with colorful visuals that conveyed important gospel messages. That is a good idea, right? Or, it would have been had not the resulting poster board and marker fumes reminded me of the countless hours spent in my poster board-heavy classroom and caused me to have several post-school-year-stress-related dreams that resulted in me sitting bolt upright in bed on more the one occasion shouting things like, "One to ten! I've told you eight times! Number your paper from one to ten!" Needless to say, the posters came down the next morning.

Later, as I was taking several loads of non-visual-aid-related trash to the dumpster, I noticed that my garden was starting to look more than a little waterlogged after three weeks of record rainfall. Then the thought suddenly came to me that my overstocked visual aids could be used to protect my tomatoes from being over-watered nigh unto death... but alas, it was not to be. The rain quickly disintegrated the posters, leaving my tomatoes drowned in rain, paper pulp, and marker ink.

My other visual aid recycling attempts were just as fruitless.

It turns out that they are not absorbant enough to function as paper towels.

And using them as bath towels is just as ill advised...unless you like paper cuts in places where it is very difficult to place a bandage.

I even tried to pawn some of the visual aids off on some of my visiting niblets instead of giving the girls their usual "Aunt Mindy" presents. Poor Kenna wasn't impressed. Apparently two-year-olds prefer dollys and gummies to used posters depicting principles taught in Alma. Who would have thought it?

So in the end, my stockpile of visual aids went back into hiding in various corners of my apartment. I might end up finding another use for them someday, right? I could always start a NetFlix-style visual aid rental service... or use them for fire fuel during power outages caused by natural disasters related to signs of the second coming. They should be easy to recognize...

...I think I have poster that lists the signs of the second coming around her somewhere. Maybe some of those visual aids will come in handy after all!