Scott Lyerly

NaNoWriMo – The Lessons Learned

December 3rd, 2014

Let’s start off with this brief summary of my participation in this year’s NaNoWriMo:

I WON!

Yes, that’s right, I won the NaNoWriMo contest this year, where anyone who hits the 50,000 word mark in a brand-new-never-having-written-a-word-of-your-NaNoWriMo-novel inside of thirty days wins. What do we win? The ability to say we won. That’s it. No cash, no prizes, though there are some nifty T-shirts you can buy. So, in short, you win bragging rights.

Which is saying a lot for a free contest where there are thousands of winners.

That out of the way, I want to reflect on the lessons I learned from cranking out 50k words in a month’s time.

1) You are not alone. There are lots of people out there willing to lend encouragement and good thoughts and happy vibes and whatever else they feel like throwing your way for support. There are communities out there supporting writers, there are meet ups where you can all sit down together and write and lend an actual hand for someone to hold if they need it. There are professional writers who have lent their voices in encouragement, and there is no end to the number of people tweeting about NaNoWriMo on a daily basis.

2) You are absolutely alone. No one can write this thing for you. It’s you by yourself, mano-e-mano, man versus machine versus calendar. It’s a gnarly threeway brawl that you and you alone must fight. Nobody else can jump in. This isn’t the WWE. You can’t tag somebody else in if you feel like you’re fading. You are the only one who can write your book. Otherwise you fail the contest.

3) You are not alone. Think your special? Just because you did it? Just because you hit your daily word count? Get in line. There are thousands and thousands of people who jumped into NaNoWriMo and have hit their daily word counts. Thousands have hit their word counts sooner, faster, higher than you have. Take that in, realize this, take a big deep breath…then let it go. You can’t get caught up in how far ahead or behind you are in reference to anybody else. To do that invites disaster. If you start doing some sort of comparison project with your fellow writers, you’ll get into a mine-is-bigger-than-yours mentality that is at best a complete waste of time, and at worst mojo-wrecking. If you’ve got your mojo working, who cares if your mojo is better than somebody else’s? Who you trying to impress with that shit?

4) Write as much as you can as early as you can. Cause you never know when your gonna get an injury that requires you to be carted off the field. My goal was to finish my word count by Thanksgiving (which I did, by the way). I wanted to get it done so that I could enjoy my holiday, maybe spend the day picking at some words but not feel forced to hit a daily number. Besides, the food coma was gonna be epic this year, man, epic.

You know what I enjoyed most on Thanksgiving? Pedialyte. Thursday morning I got a case of the stomach flu and that was all she (or in my case, he) wrote. For two days my colon sounds like the French countryside in 1944. By Saturday I was finally starting to feel better, but it was slow going. I didn’t have a lot of energy since I hadn’t had a decent calorie in two days. By Sunday I felt well enough to open up the laptop, type in one paragraph, and that was it.

5) When the month ends, the motivation does too. It’s good to feel the pressure of the deadline. It makes you work for it, forces you to make time for writing. Even if you’re just picking up the story, writing 200 words for the fifteen minutes you have leftover from your lunch break, and closing it again. The deadline manhandles you into writing during any snippets of free time you have.

When the deadline has passed, the pressure goes with it. Now you’re not up against a wall, trying to squeeze words in, desperate to hit a daily word count. Now you start to think “Well, I couldn’t quite get to it today, I’ll just pick it back up tomorrow.” WRONG! You will not! Stop kidding yourself. If your motivation for writing starts to flag, then so does the writing, then it’s six months after the end of NaNoWriMo and you’re sitting on 55k words instead of 50k. Stop that shit! Open up your laptop and lay down some magic!

6) The choice of word processors makes all the difference. If you’re using a word processor or a typewriter or a pen and paper, that’s your business. I’m not going to tell you you need to use this one over that one. What I am going to tell you is that, no matter what you use, you’ve got to have it handy at a moment’s notice. You never know when you’ll get five minutes to hammer out two really great sentences. With a pen and paper, that’s a lot easier than just about any other writing medium. You can carry them with you anywhere and be ready to write in five seconds flat. With a typewriter, that kind of thing is a lot harder. You can’t really lug a typewrite around with you everywhere you go. I mean, you CAN, but you’ll get a lot of looks that suggest it might be time for the men in the white coats.

My choice of word processor was Google drive. Again, this goes back to the available-at-a-moment’s-notice requirement. Google drive is all cloud based, so your fictional manifesto is available anywhere you have an internet connection.

Using Google Drive, I created the document and was able to access it from any machine I happened to be using at the time. All I needed to do was to log into my Google account and viola! there it was. I could access it from a laptop, or a desktop, or even my phone. How’s that for ubiquitous? It was like having a pen and paper with me at all times. The best part? I didn’t have to type in all the things I had hand-written earlier. Best of both worlds.

7) Finishing feels like the frickin bomb! Nuf said there.

That’s what I learned this go-round. Maybe I’ll learn more next year. Already got the idea forming. Just have to let it stew, do some homework, and, oh yeah, finish the current one I still haven’t finished.
NaNoWriMo 2014 Update

November 12th, 2014

We’re twelve days into NaNoWriMo 2014. How are you doing? Have you cracked under the pressure? Are the words flowing out of you like silver streams of pure literature destined to alter the landscape of fiction as we know it? Are you plowing through your novel, letting the stream of consciousness spill from your mind in an unhinged screed* not fit for human consumption?

(Hint: The answer to all of these could be “yes”.)

For my own foray into NaNoWriMo, things are going well. I passed the halfway point last night. I’m no longer underwater in my word count. As of this writing, I’m closing in on 27,000 words. Basic math tells me I have about 23,000 words to go. (Basic math, by the way, is sometimes a stretch for me–I was an English lit major, after all–but I think I’m on solid footing here.)

Here’s what I’ve uncovered in the twelve days since I’ve started this journey:

* I’m in LOVE with how much this contest forces me to write. I have a terrible habit of being what Stephen “Uncle Stevie” King call a “lazy writer”. When the writing gets tough, I have a tendency to walk away from it and come back a few months later with no clearer way of tackling the problem. Except that, a few months later, my writing muscles have gone unused and have atrophied and my creative mind has grown fat and lethargic. This contest forces me to confront my writing every day, to flex my penmonkey muscles, and make some actual progress.

* A single sentence CAN turn into a novel. Like, quick. The novel I’m writing writing now is called Lost Things. It was based on a single (and perhaps rather long-winded) “what-if” sentence I wrote on the back of a church bulletin. The sentence looked kinda like this:

What if a man helps ferry dead souls to the afterlife by the use of items that show up on his kitchen counter that were personal and special to the deceased, but one day, using one of these “lost things”, he accidentally frees something evil and is then caught in a battle to defeat it?

Yeah, it’s a run-on, I get it. But it’s turned into something special for me. This one (long) sentence has turned into 27,0000 words in twelve days. This short synopsis helps flesh out that “what-if” sentence:

For forty-two years Bill has been dealing with the Lost Things. They appear in the morning on his kitchen counter. Each time they do, he takes them to a local secluded glade and, using an ancient rite, he frees the Lost Things’ owners, for each Lost Thing represents a deceased member of the Bill’s town. Each soul needs help transcending the void. After so many years, Bill is tired. He can feel his own time is near and knows he’ll need a replacement, which is why he agrees to teach Geoff. Geoff is a young man, married to his cancer-stricken wife Mara. But there’s a darker force at work in Bill’s town. A force that drives them to free the soul of a maniac and unleash a monster. Bill, Geoff, and Mara must overcome their fears and stop this evil before it can unleash Hell on earth.

As I plow through the writing, I find the it’s unspooling in my mind, with each day adding a new facet that I can fold into the main story.

* As this is my first NaNoWriMo, I know that when I go and try doing this again next year, it’s entirely possible that the experience will be the WORST writing experience of my life. I have this thing in my head right now itching to break free. It’s scratching at the inside of my skull with long dirty fingernails, trying to open the cracks. It’s leaking out now, right into my novel, but that’s this year. Next year, I might have the story idea, but it could fight me tooth-and-frickin-nail every day for thirty days.

* Insomuch as there is a community out there to help encourage you to write, what with all the “pep talks” that appear in your NaNoWriMo mailbox, the NaNoWriMo forums, and the NaNoCoach hashtag on Twitter, this journey, this effort, this mountain I’m (and you’re) trying to climb–yeah, well, news flash, you’re climbing it ALONE. No one can help you with it. If it’s climbing a mountain, then all the encouragement is people lining the sides of the mountain trail cheering you on. But none of them can lend a hand or lower a rope or a tree branch or find something useful to…sorry, drifting in a movie quotes for a moment. The point is, YOU are the one writing. YOU are responsible for all 50,000 words. No one else. And while encouragement helps, YOU have to be the one with the intestinal fortitude to soldier on. This is when you learn whether you really can do it.

That’s where I am so far. To date, it’s a really great experience. More than halfway there. If you’re not halfway there, no sweat, you have time. We’re not halfway through the month. You got days to make up some lost words. So let’s keep it going. Time to knuckle under, not lose focus, not stray from the marathon course, and keep going.

I got this.

So do you.

* Borrowed this phrase from a friend of mine because I love it.
A Grateful Remembrance

November 11th, 2014

I’m reposting my entry from last year as a way of remembering the veterans in my family. This Veteran’s Day, take time to thanks the veterans you know, and their families, for both have made sacrifices for our country.

Scott Lyerly

I’ve been thinking a lot today about my grandmother who passed away at the end of this past August. She was ninety-four years old. She out-lived her husband, my grandfather, by twenty-seven years.

The reason I’ve been thinking about her recently is because her loss is still very recent, and I haven’t quite let that settle into my mind or my heart. And because it’s Veterans Day.

My grandfather was a Marine. He joined the Marines after the bombming of Pearl Harbor. Because I was only thirteen when he died, I didn’t have the chance to ask him about his time in the service.

So many members of my grandmother’s and grandfather’s families were in the service. My grandfather and his brother were both in WWII. My grandmother’s cousins all had husbands in the service, as was my grandmother’s brother. One cousin lost her husband in the war and went…

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Happy International Keyboard Shortcut Day

November 5th, 2014

Happy International Keyboard Shortcut Day.

Never heard of it? Yeah, neither had it. That’s likely because Dick Kusleika over at Daily Dose of Excel made it up. Read more about it here. Basically, the idea is to use only your keyboard as much as possible between the time of 2:30 and 3:30 PM local on this, the first Wednesday in November.

I’m totally on board. I’m such a keyboard drive guy from my days use an old green-screen inventory management system. This should be pretty much a snap.

Happy Keyboarding!
Some Election Day Thoughts on the Viability of Candidates

November 4th, 2014
Did you vote today? Should you have? If your state was running an election and you voted, good for you. If your state was running an election and you decided not to vote, well, then I guess good for you as well. One of the great things about our country is the fact that you could decide to vote or not to vote. It’s totally up to you. It’s that freedom of choice that we as Americans have that a lot of other countries do not have.

If, on the other hand, you had the opportunity to vote and simply didn’t because you were too lazy to get off the couch to do so, well then shame on you. You missed a great chance.

I really enjoy voting. I always feel happy and elated after I finish. I know I’m one small voice in a very large conversation, at least I’m making the effort for that voice to be heard. I’m actually not that heavily into politics. I don’t spend a lot of time reading political blogs, or trolling through online news/media outlets that cater to my political leanings. I do enjoy reading Politifact because of the way they pick apart the issues. They always provide clarification on some of the finer and more complex details of these talking points. I also enjoy FiveThirtyEight, because Nate Silver is so good at what he does. That’s pretty much it.

That said, I have to confess that I have opinions on what makes a good political leader. (I’m thinking mainly of the Executive branch here.)

To state my opinion, I’ll use Massachusetts as an example. Today I voted for Governor of Massachusetts. My options were Martha Coakley (D) or Charlie Baker (R). No, I’m not going to tell you how I voted. What I am going to do is talk about each candidate’s background (at a high level) and explain why I’m not sure either of their backgrounds necessarily will lead them to be effective governors.

Let’s start with Charlie Baker. In the 2012 election, I lost count of how many times I heard somebody say “we need a business leader in the White House.” Let’s bring it down a level and focus on governor, often times the step just below President. Charlie Baker was in fact a business later. He was the CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and helped turn it around when it was facing bankruptcy.
1. Lots of people say that good business leaders would make great political executives. Here are my basic problems with that:
  A company executive doesn’t play by the same rules that a political executive must play by. If the CEO of the company doesn’t like the performance of someone in his company, he can fire that person. Yes, there might be some hoops to jump through when it comes letting someone go, there are Human Resource personnel to consult, but in the end a CEO has enough power to make those kind of personnel decisions. When you were the president, or the governor, you can’t fire people whose performance you don’t like. Sure you can fire your cabinet secretaries or your office staff, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. A political executive needs to get work done. To do that they need to work with their counterparts in the legislature. If the president doesn’t get along with his counterparts in the legislature, he can’t fire them. Both parties have to agree to compromise or, as has been the case recently, agree not to compromise, in which case nothing gets done.
2. Another point is that company executive can enact policy is without necessarily having a consensus. Again, a business executive isn’t going to operate in a vacuum, and obviously they will consult with other officers and usually other outside entities such HR and Legal to ensure they’re not breaking laws or fail to be in compliance with federal regulations, etc. In politics, however, order to enact political policies, you must have that majority that you don’t need in a company.
On the flip side, I’ve heard people say that lawyers make the best politicians. After all, we are a law driven the society, and the policies, laws. and procedures that politicians enact are there to provide further governance for the people. Who best to understand the inner workings of how laws are constructed and work than a lawyer? Martha Coakley is a lawyer. Does that mean she is the best qualified candidate? Not necessarily.
1. Lawyers, in addition to have a clear understanding of how the law works, also need to understand how to lead. Being a lawyer means that you understand and know how to navigate to labyrinthine bureaucracy at is the federal government. Just because you know the way out of the maze, doesn’t mean you know how to lead people there. Sure some lawyers, probably lots of them, have a lot of leadership ability and a lot of charisma. But the practical experience of running an organization, such as a public company, weighs an awful lot in people s minds.
So who makes the best executive? A governor possibly makes the best executive when jumping from state level to govern our country. That’s why you see so many governors eventually becoming president of United States. But that’s not always the case. We’ve seen deeply ideological governors become deeply ideological presidents. They weren’t necessarily the best or brightest, yet their popular appeal helped get them in.

No, I’m thinking something else entirely. Someone with a much different experience than lawyers and CEOs. I’m going to go out on a limb here. I’m going to vote for a different kind of person.

The project manager.

This may sound weird and almost silly on the face of it, but hear me out. The primary role of a project manager is to take a group of people and lead them in an effort to deliver something to the business. If you want to get more technical, here’s the definition from PRINCE2:

A Project is a temporary organization that is created for the purpose of delivering one or more business products according to an agreed Business Case.

It seems to me that a lot of the same characteristics that qualify a person to be a great project manager could also qualify them to be a great public official. Let’s focus on a few.
1. In any given project there is an end goal in mind. I would argue that these would be the laws, doctrines, policies, and initiatives that presidents put forth as part of their administration. How many times if we heard someone say what they’re going to do in the first hundred days in office? “Oh yeah?” I think. “Do you have a project plan for that? Then how do you know you’re going to achieve it?”
2. Any project manager work his or her salt is going to lay out the risks and issues associated with getting this job done. When you do this, you get a fuller understanding for where the most pressing problems are or may be, as well as the to monetize (and there for plan for) any problem that occurs. I would hope any political executive who is trying to promote some kind of change would do this.
3. A project manager is going to be given a budget. And, if they’re any good, they’ll managed to it. If it seems like the project is not going to come in on time or on budget, they may have to go back to a governing body to explain what the delay is. This is basic project management stuff. In this case, the governing body would be the voting citizens of the United States of America.
4. A project manager is going to assemble a team that is capable of getting the job done. These are subject matter experts, technical advisers, and of course, the do-ers. You can only have so many managers before somebody has to roll up their sleeves and get the job done. If the project manager surrounds himself with the right people, then the project moves forward in a smoother way than if it was their cousin Vinny or their brother-in-law Bubba.
5. Lastly the project manager has to be able to lay down the law when necessary. Assemble a good team, trust them to do the work, guide them when they need it, provide direction when appropriate, and given them the smack down if it’s not getting done. The understand that they succeed as a team, but if they fail, it’s the project manager who has failed.
So why not look for candidates who have a strong background in project management? There have to be reasons why this is not a good idea. Let’s hear ’em. Comment away.
NaNoWriMo 2014 – Day 2

November 2nd, 2014

I promise not post progress every single day. I think will tend to make people bonkers. But here we are at the end of day two of NaNoWriMo, and I’m just curious: how’s it going?

For myself, I’m just over 6000 words. It’s a nice start, especially since I know that once the work week hits, life returns to its normal state of crazy.

No matter how far you’ve gotten remember that it’s farther than you were. Keep writing!
NaNoWriMo 2014 Commenceth

November 1st, 2014

NaNoWriMo started today. For those unfamiliar with this term, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. It started 15 years ago in the San Francisco area with 21 people participating. Last year there were over 400,000 people who participated. Not bad for something that started as a tiny idea.

So what is NaNoWriMo? It’s a thirty day month in which you are challenged to write one novel. You might think, hey, banging out a novel in thirty days? No sweat. I can read one in five. How hard can it be to write one? Well, marathon man, you can drive 26.2 miles easy-peasy, but can you run it? Okay then.

Basically, you have one month, the month of November, to write a novel. What constitutes a novel? For the purposes of NaNoWriMo, 50,000 words is a novel. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s a given that it’s a first draft. It doesn’t even have to be complete. You might end up writing an Alan Moore length million word gem. As long as you’ve got 50,000 words logged by midnight on November 30th, you win.

What do you win? The ability to say you came to play and play you did. It’s bragging rights. That’s about it. No cash, no prizes, just the right to say you took up the pen and completed the challenge. That said, there are sponsors who put up prizes, and who knows? You post and validate your 50,000 diamond, maybe you’ll win those. But that’s luck of the draw. The main prize is saying you did it.

Cost to participate? Exactly zero dollars. Best. Price. Ever.

Last year I couldn’t participate. I was in the middle of trying to finish the first draft of a crime novel I’ve been writing. This year, despite being in the middle of revising the second draft of said novel, I had an idea and decided to jump in.

This is my first time participating. I’m determined to finish. Rough calculation means I need to crank out about 1600 words per day. This will take me about an hour to hour and a half each day. That’s the goal. Plus, if I write more on the weekends, I can “bank” some words so I’m not as crushed for word count in the middle of the week.

I’ve already got a start and have a little over 3000 words written. I’ll be posting updates on this blog, but if you’re participating this year, you can follow me on NaNoWriMo at this link. I’ll be posting excerpts and looking for ideas and feedback as I go. Obviously I won’t have time to edit just yet, but any constructive feedback is helpful. The more the merrier.

Let’s tackle this beast together! Who’s with me?

Oh yeah, one more thing: the writing has to be legitimate writing. This doesn’t count:
Happy Halloween!

October 31st, 2014

A Happy Halloween to everyone out there in the blogosphere!

Excel Geeking: Unwinding a Crosstabbed Dataset

October 3rd, 2014

Sometimes you have to work with a data set that is not in a state conducive to, well, anything. I’m thinking specifically about crosstabbed data sets. More than once I’ve had to deal with a data set that looks like this:

Oh, if only there were a way to unwind this file so that it was in a more normalized state for querying, lookups, and general analysis.

Well, now there is.

I created this routine a number of years ago because I had a monthly process that required taking a dataset like the one above and reformatting it into a layout that looks like this:

Needless to say, the data I was dealing with was a good deal larger than the sample above. I’ve used this routine on datasets that ended up outputting half a million rows. Yeah, it takes a few minutes, but it works. On smaller datasets, it works pretty fast.


Sub UnWindCrosstabData()
'   This takes a cross tabbed data and "unwinds" it to a flat file.

    ' Variable declarations.
    Dim rng         As Range
    Dim shNew       As Worksheet
    Dim lCols       As Long
    Dim lRows       As Long
    Dim i           As Long
    Dim j           As Long
    Dim r           As Long
    Dim vTemp       As Variant

    ' If the selection count is greater than one,
    ' assume a range to uwind has been selected.
    If Selection.Count > 1 Then
        Set rng = Selection
    Else
        ' Otherwise, use a range input box to get the range via the user.
        On Error Resume Next
        Set rng = Application.InputBox("Select the range to be unwound:", , , , , , , 8)
        ' If we get an error, the user did not select a range, and we exit the sub.
        If Err.Number <> 0 Then
            MsgBox "You need to select a range to use this utility.", vbExclamation, "Selection Error"
            Exit Sub
        End If
        On Error GoTo 0
    End If

    ' Get the total number of columns we will be dealing with.
    lCols = rng.Columns.Count

    ' Get the total number of rows we'll be dealing with, taking the use
    ' of headers into account.
    lRows = rng.Rows.Count - 1

    ' Speed up processing by shutting off screen flicker.
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False

    ' Set the new worksheet that will house the data.
    Set shNew = ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets.Add

    ' Reactivate the source sheet.
    rng.Parent.Activate

    ' Select and copy the source range, and paste it into the new sheet.
    rng.Select
    rng.Copy
    shNew.Activate
    ActiveSheet.Cells(1, 1).PasteSpecial xlPasteValues

    ' Reset the range to the pasted selection.
    Set rng = Selection

    ' Insert a column for the data header.
    rng.Cells(1, 2).Select
    Selection.EntireColumn.Insert

    ' Copy the record identifiers down, taking headers into account.
    For i = 1 To lCols - 2
        rng.Cells(2, 1).Select
        Range(Selection, Selection.Offset(lRows - 1, 0)).Select
        Selection.Copy
        rng.Cells(1, 1).Select
        Selection.End(xlDown).Select
        Selection.Offset(1, 0).Select
        Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues, Operation:=xlNone, SkipBlanks _
            :=False, Transpose:=False
        Application.CutCopyMode = False

    Next i

    ' Fill in the data header column.
    rng.Cells(1, 2).Value = "Data Header"
    r = 2
    For i = 1 To lCols - 1
        vTemp = rng.Cells(1, i + 2).Value
        For j = 1 To lRows
            rng.Cells(r, 2).Value = vTemp
            r = r + 1
        Next j
    Next i

    ' Insert a column for the data.
    rng.Cells(1, 3).EntireColumn.Select
    Selection.Insert Shift:=xlToRight

    ' Fill in the data.
    rng.Cells(1, 3).Value = "Data"
    r = 2
    For i = 0 To lCols - 2
        rng.Cells(r, i + 4).Select
        Range(Selection, Selection.Offset(lRows - 1, 0)).Select
        Selection.Copy
        rng.Cells(r + (i * lRows), 3).Select
        Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues
    Next i

    ' Delete the unneeded columns
    rng.Cells(1, 4).EntireColumn.Select
    Range(Selection, Selection.End(xlToRight)).Select
    Selection.Delete Shift:=xlToLeft

    ' Turn screen updating back on.
    Application.ScreenUpdating = True

End Sub

And having posted this, I’m already posting a hack. This routine only deals with one column of data to the left of your values. But what if you have more than one column? What if, for example, in the dataset above, you have name and address and city and state and zip code and email and phone number and…well, you get the idea.

What I do is to concatenate all of these fields together into a single column. I always use a delimiter, and for me, two good delimiters are the pipe (“|”) and the tilde (“~”). Once the field is concatenated and converted to values, I’ll run the routine above, then I’ll use Text To Columns to break all the columns back out again.

Use the above freely* and enjoy. If you have suggestion or find bugs, post in the comments section.

*and at your own risk, I assume no responsibility, legalese legalese legalese

How Was Your Weekend?

September 22nd, 2014

This weekend, like many of the weekends during the school year, was a blur. Ballet classes, Sunday school, grocery shopping, etcetera etcetera–the list runs long.

One of the things we did was man a table at the local Farmer’s Market. The town Farmer’s Market has been running for about a month now, and will keep on going until the middle of October. This Saturday was particularly fun because it was “kids vendor” day, the day when the local town kids can make things and sell them. There were the usual suspects of cookies, cupcakes, and Rice Krispy treats. There were also the usual craft-y suspects in the form of loop band bracelets, bead necklaces, and paracord bracelets. There was one little girl selling colored pencil drawings she’d made for $2 a drawing (each came with its own sheet protector–in case you were wondering what all you got for your $2).

The Boy Scouts were there selling popcorn, which, if you’ve never had, is very good. It’s not Girl Scout cookie good, but then again, what is?

Of course, there are other vendors there. Actual, you know, farmers. There were four or five farms represented, selling everything for apples to shallots to meat. (Apparently Boylston had its own meat CSA. Who knew?) There were also other craftsmen/women there as well. One woman was selling handmade soap (we bought a few bars because they smelled so good), there was a vendor selling goods made from alpaca hair, there was a local woodworker selling things like bowls and oil lanterns and pens. I bought a pen because they were just fantastically beautiful.

My kids didn’t have anything to sell. Instead, they had been asked to man the table for the local food pantry. The food pantry had been running low on stock and one of the parents of the third graders mobilized an effort to get it restocked. Because of schedules and conflicts, there were a lot of people who could be present at the Farmer’s Market to help collect the dry goods. So we volunteered. And while I can’t say they stood there for four hours taking food donations, they were there to help out for a while and accept food (with their parents there to pick up the slack for when they bolted.)

All in all, it was a great time. The kids had a ton of fun with so many of their friends who were there to buy or sell. And they helped out a local charity. I’m really proud of them.

Check out some of the pictures from the day below.