A Time of Painful Renewal

Autumn officially began this week and with it comes not only cool days and bright colors but also all the fundraisers. Boy Scout popcorn. Cookie dough for school. Girl Scout nuts and magazines. Take your checkbook and hide in a cave-- Here comes the kids!


I'll have plenty to say about popcorn in the coming days, being that I'm the troop's Popcorn Kernel. (I'm not kidding, that's what the person who runs the sale is called. ACK!). But today I want to tell you a story about the GS fall sale.


I was at the big kick-off event about a month ago out at Timberlane. Girl Scouts have had a fall product sale for a long time now. Compared to the insanity of cookies, the fall sale is barely a blip on the troop year. When I was a lass we sold calendars, then it was calendars and nuts, then just nuts, now it's magazines and nuts. The magazine sale, new last year, had a lot of bugs in the system. Add that to the fact that most people can't follow simple written directions, and by December the magazine sale had everyone hopping mad.


At this big kick-off meeting, people still felt like they hadn't complained enough about how last year went and proceeded to hog up the meeting time with their grievances. The sales rep guy was way, WAY too patient with them all:

"My subscriptions didn't start coming until March!"

"I paid for a year and it stopped after six months!"

"My mother got double billed!"

"Those annoying renewal offers come every week!"

At that last one, the calm sales rep raised his hand for attention.

"Remember that renewal offers you get in the mail are from the magazine publisher itself, not Girl Scouting. If you renew with them, Girl Scouts doesn't get any of the money."

The room quieted down a bit. He continued, mistakenly believeing he was getting control of the room finally.

"You have to renew on one of these forms," he said, holding up a copy of the now familiar form, "in order for your troop to make any profit from the sale."

The room was now practically silent. The only sound was that of women muttering not very Girl Scout words under their breath.

Are you kidding me? I thought. These women have renewed their subscriptions with the publishers and thought it would count? Uh-oh.

That uh-oh then happened quickly. One leader broke the silence with an exasperated, "Well, I wish to hell someone would have explained that a year ago!"

And with that the room broke out into chaos again. It was the single worst kick-off event in recent memory.

With that said, if you need any of your magazines renewed, let me know. I've got plenty of forms.

Warning: Girl Scout Content Ahead

There's a wide range in Girl Scout leadership styles. Starting at one end you have the "Assistant Leader" who is that mom who stays for all the meetings and doesn't mind wiping up glue or spilled juice. At the other end are the whackadoodle leaders who do Girl Scout things even without girls around because they just can't get enough. Fearless Co-Leader and I have met plenty of those Whackadoodles and contrary to what you might think, we are not them.

That said, we just got back from from two days of leader training.

It was held out a Camp Ledgewood which is in Peninsula. We had never been there before which was part of the appeal to go to the training. We could scope out a new property and see if we wanted to camp there with our girls. As for that, the answer is yes. The camp is amazing and I can't wait to get my girls out there is see it.

Fearless and I have been to plenty of trainings in the past. (I'm not even going to mention the number of hours!) We use them as mini vacations and we almost always learn some new things for the girls. For this training event we went to three classes the first day, swam in their gorgeous pool, spent the night in an Adirondack cabin and had two more classes the next day. We learned a new way to decorate t-shirts, made lunch bags and cell phone cases out of duct tape, learned that we knew nothing about trip planning and got an overview of the new program coming out.

When other leaders found out we were from Erie Shores we would get quizzed nonstop about Timberlane and someone (not us) would always called it "The Hilton". Whatever. Just because our camp has flush toilets and dishes in the cupboard they think we're soft. I prefer to call it civilized.

As for those Whackadoodles, this event was chock full of them. They practically glow green they are so Scouted up. And just to reiterate it's not us. It's not us. It's not us.