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rich. A couple of years ago during the holidays, Rowley came over and we had just run out of toilet paper at my house. My family was using these holiday cocktail napkins as a substitute until Dad got to the store again. merry Christmas Rowley thought the holiday napkins were some kind of really fancy toilet paper, and he asked me if my family was rich. I wasn't gonna pass up the opportunity to impress him.

YEP. Anyway, I'm Not rich, and that's the problem. I tried to figure out a way a kid my age could get his hands on some cash, and then it hit me: We could start a lawn care service. I'm not talking about some average, run-of-the-mill lawn care service, either. I'm talking about a company that takes lawn care to the next level. We decided to name our company the V.I.P. Lawn Service. We called up the Yellow Pages people and told them we wanted to place an ad in their book. And not just one of those tiny little text ads, but a really big one with full color that takes up two whole pages. But get this: The Yellow Pages people told us it was gonna cost us a few thousand bucks to put our ad in their book.

I told them that didn't make a lot of sense to me, because how's someone supposed to pay for an ad if they haven't even earned any money yet? Me and Rowley realized we were gonna have to do this a different way, and make our own ads. I figured we could just make flyers and put them in every mailbox in our neighborhood. All we needed was some clip art to get us started. So we went down to the corner store and bought one of those cards women get each other on their birthdays.

Hope your birthday is HOT, HOT, HOT! Then we scanned it into Rowley's computer and pasted pictures of our heads onto the bodies from the card. After that we got some clip art of lawn tools and put it all together. nkledc. Then we printed it out, and I have to

say, it looked great. V.I.P. LAWN SERVICE PAMPER YOURSELF AND YOUR LAWN WITH OUR AWARD-WINNING, WORLD-CLASS SERVICE! CALL 555-2941 I did some math, and I figured it would cost us at least a couple hundred bucks in color ink cartridges and paper to make enough flyers for the whole neighborhood. So we asked Rowley's dad if he'd go

out to the store and get us all the stuff we needed. Mr. Jefferson didn't go for it. In fact, he told us we couldn't use his computer or print out any more copies of our flyer. I was a little surprised by that, because if Mr. Jefferson wanted us to pay him back, he sure wasn't making it easy. But all we could really do was take our one flyer and get out of his office. Then me and Rowley went around from house to house showing everyone our flyer and telling them about the V.I.P. Lawn Service.