Where Were You When I Needed You?

This time every year, our church sponsors a "Backpack Party" - the church buys a bunch of backpacks and church members take as many as they want and then fill them up according to the school supply list that is inside each backpack. The backpacks are distributed at the Backpac Party a couple of weeks before school starts. It's an awesome community project, and one that my church has sponsored for almost 20 years now. But I digress. We got our backpack on Sunday and read the list of supplies - they were for a 4th grader. I got some of the stuff Sunday afternoon at an awesome sale that Staples was having, and I bought the rest tonight at my favorite neighborhood store, Wal-Mart. Let me retract - I bought all but one item on the list. I still could not find wide-ruled loose-leaf notebook paper at my beloved WM. Instead, I found shelves full of graph paper.

This is of importance because twelve years ago when I was finishing my Bachelor's Degree, I needed graph paper for a few of my classes. I drove all over town until I finally found a graph paper notebook. And just last year, I was tutoring someone in their MicroEconomics class, and we needed graph paper but there was none to be found. I ended up making up a page of the little squares on Excel and printing out a bunch of pages for us to draw our supply and demand curves. If only we could have fast-forwarded to today when I saw two shelves of the graph paper - in both loose-leaf and notebook form.

I don't really need it for my classes in security, but it's good to know that Wal-Mart has plenty of it if I do.