Recycling Old School Supplies

My sister-in-law was going to throw out several partially used spiral notebooks. My mother-in-law thought that I would put them to good use and brought them to me. The kids and I spent part of this afternoon making new covers for the notebooks. The children chose paper from my scrapbook supplies. The paper was glued onto the original covers.

The notebooks will be used for subjects that never need a full notebook's worth of paper during a school year. Here are our results. I was pleased with the results and the kids are excited about their personalized notebooks. Craftier people could probably get better results by using embellishments.

Packing and Cleaning Frenze

Mike and I have been busy cleaning, disposing, and packing up little-used items for moving. Mike is tackling the garage which was used as a catch-all since our garage sale in July. Mike traveled a lot when he was in management. He drove 2 hours each way to work. Lots of driving means lots of oil changes and lots of used motor oil stored in 5 gallon drums in the garage. Mike only drives 30 minutes to work, but much of the old motor oil remains.

Being conscientious, eco-friendly people, we tried to drop off some of the used motor oil in recycling locations. The problem is that they only accept 5 gallons of used motor oil at a time. By hitting various locations, we were able to drop off 3 buckets of oil yesterday and will be dropping off 3 more buckets today. What a pain! Not to mention the extra gas (and motor oil) that will be used to transport the used oil.

Mike usually only takes off 1 day each week. It's a good thing that we have some time before we need to get out of this house.