Sophie has sold 75 boxes of cookies.

We owe this most of this phenomenal success to her hard-core sales tactics at coffee hour at church.

Essentially, her method consists of unobtrusively sidling up to someone while holding the dreaded sign-up sheet, and standing next to them (looking the other way and trying to appear invisible) until they offer to buy some cookies.

So we're done. Just as well, because Bobby flat-out refused to take the sign-up sheet in to work, not even to just leave it in the kitchen. He said no, someone else already had their sheet in there. So I was like, well, so? Can't there be two sheets? If people were going to buy two boxes, they'd buy one from each kid. But he wouldn't hear of it. He's very odd sometimes.

He has also become terribly enthusiastic about eBay, after selling his old camera lens and buying a new tripod. He knows all kinds of eBay jargon, is ransacking the house for Things We Could Sell, and actually woke up upset this morning because he'd had a nightmare where someone left him bad feedback.

In a completely unrelated topic, we had to have our septic tank pumped out yesterday. The very words "septic tank" are horrible enough on their own; let's just say that the reality is just as hideous as one might imagine. So that was a rather unpleasant way to toss two hundred bucks out into the world. Sort of interesting, though. I tried hard to persuade Sophie to look upon it as a homeschooling project and take notes, but she would have none of it, saying that the beauty of homeschooling lay choosing her own areas of interest. Well, what she actually said was "Yuck mom, are you crazy? I don't want to learn about smelly gross stuff." Clearly she lacks any spirit of scientific inquiry and will thus never become a Nobel Prize winner, able to support her parents in the luxurious style to which they would like to become accustomed.