Back to School: This Week's Assignment From the League

I haven't posted on my blog in over two weeks and only once in all of August, and I haven't posted in the League since that one date that month.  But here I am with this week's League topic:

Summer’s over, it’s time to go back to school! (Interpret it as you will.)

Here's my take.  In the early years of school, the end of summer meant getting new clothes and supplies for each year.  I can remember having more than one Trapper Keeper binder in several different school years.  Remember those things?  I don't know if the one in the photo below was one that I had, though that design is certainly one that I would have liked back in the day.

And of course to go inside the binder I always had to get paper, pencils, pens and a pencil pouch. I pretty much gave up on binders once I got to high school and we were required to have notebooks for each class.  I must confess I never used a backpack all that time and always had a ton of homework each day! And I had to walk home for most of those years.

Until fifth grade, I would always get a new lunch box, one of those with some currently popular character.  I don't know what happened the ones I once had, but I know I had a Strawberry Shortcake one once.  Beginning in sixth grade, my lunch went into a paper bag.

College was more of the same with buying school supplies.  Going to community college first meant getting the same supplies as in grammar school, middle school and high school, as well as having to buy textbooks and supplies from the campus bookstore.  Anyone who has been to college will know how expensive this stuff can get.  It was good thing I took both semesters of Spanish since the same textbook was used for both terms.   Going to a four-year after ward was still more expensive textbooks from the campus bookstore as well as buying writing supplies and paper,  but now that I was living on the campus, I would need dorm supplies--bathroom stuff, some snacks, my own TV set (which last years after I graduated) and my own phone. This was in the late 1990s, before cell phones and when everyone had a cordless phone with an answering machine (I still have one of those!)

Though I'm done with college and have no children,  I still find the back-to-school sales at stores to be helpful.  I always see a coupon for two packages of Bic Pens in the Sunday paper at some point during the late summer.  I always keep it because  I know that some store will eventually discount the school stuff, including these pens.  I took advantage of this last week when target discounted these pens to 86 cents a package and used the coupon to buy them.  When I last worked at Dollar Tree, they had pocket calculators in their back-to-school display and when I got off work one day, I bought one of these, which I still have today.  It's been seven years since I last worked there, but my cheap calculator from then is still working.  Everyone still needs pens and stuff, so even if you don't have to worry about children and are no longer in school yourself, these sales can still be of some use to you.
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Some of this weeks other participating bloggers are:
Monster Cafe Saltillo
Memories of Toymorrow
Green Plastic Squirt Gun