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DECEMBER Tuesday Today I was playing Net Kritterz in my room, and Mom walked in. She watched for a while, then asked what I was doing in the game. I explained that I was watching my Chihuahua watch TV, because if your virtual pet watches at least two hours of commercials a day, it makes him happy and you get twenty bonus tokens.

十二月星期二今天我在房间里玩Net kriterz，妈妈走了进来。 她看了一会儿，然后问我在游戏中做什么。 我解释说，我正在看着我的吉娃娃看电视，因为如果你的虚拟宠物每天至少看两个小时的广告，它就会很开心，你就会得到20个奖励代币。

Then I asked Mom if she wouldn't mind spotting me ten bucks because the Net Kritterz store just started carrying trampoline shoes and I was pretty sure Gregory's Little Friend would really like to have them. But I guess I picked the wrong time to ask Mom for a loan, because it seemed like she was in a bad mood. She said I didn't have any appreciation for the "value of money" and that if I wanted to pay for my Net Kritterz "habit," it was gonna have to come out of my own pocket. I told Mom I didn't have any money of my own and that's why I kept hitting up her and Dad. But she

然后我问妈妈是否介意借我十块钱，因为Net Kritterz商店刚开始卖蹦床鞋，我敢肯定格雷戈里的小朋友一定很想买。 但我想我选错了向妈妈借钱的时间，因为她看起来心情不好。 她说我不懂得“钱的价值”，如果我想为我的Net kriterz“习惯”买单，那就得自掏腰包了。 我告诉妈妈我没有自己的钱，这就是为什么我一直在找她和爸爸。 但她

said there were plenty of things I could do to earn some. She said it's supposed to snow tonight and I could go out and shovel our neighbors' driveways tomorrow. I really don't feel comfortable knocking on doors and asking our neighbors for money. My school has three fundraisers a year, and I have to go from house to house begging people I hardly know to buy something from me. And half the time I don't even really know what it is I'm selling. HARDY GERANIUM BULBS? I wish the school would give us something useful to sell, like candy bars or cookies. The Girl Scouts are

说我可以做很多事情来赚些钱。 她说今晚应该会下雪，我明天可以出去给邻居的车道铲雪。 我真的觉得敲开邻居的门向他们要钱不太舒服。 我的学校每年有三次募捐活动，我不得不挨家挨户地乞求那些我几乎不认识的人从我这里买东西。 有一半的时间我甚至不知道我在卖什么。 耐寒天竺葵球茎？我希望学校能给我们一些有用的东西来卖，比如糖果棒或饼干。 女童子军是

lucky, because at least they get to sell stuff people actually want. The way the system works with these fundraisers is that us students do all the work and the school gives us these junky prizes as rewards. One time I sold twenty dollars' worth of gourmet coffee beans, and all I got was a cheap yo-yo that broke before I even got off school property. But Rowley really got stiffed. He sold $150 worth of beans and got a Chinese finger trap as his prize. It actually worked like it was supposed to, but Rowley couldn't get his fingers out, and his mom had to cut it off when he got home.

幸运，因为至少他们卖的是人们真正想要的东西。 这些筹款人的系统运作方式是，我们学生做所有的工作，学校给我们这些垃圾奖品作为奖励。 有一次，我卖了价值20美元的极品咖啡豆，结果只得到一个便宜的溜溜球，还没离开学校就坏了。 但罗利真的被困住了。 他卖出了价值50美元的豆子，并获得了一个中国指夹作为奖品。 它确实能正常工作，但罗利的手指拔不出来，他回家后他妈妈不得不把它剪掉。

Last year the school tried something different. They had us sell raffle tickets, and whoever won the raffle would get a spring yard cleanup from the seventh-grade class. Mrs. Spangler, who lives down the street from me, won the raffle, and on the first day of spring the whole seventh grade showed up at her house. But there were only two rakes for all those kids, so most of the class just ended up sitting around with nothing to do.

去年，学校尝试了一些不同的方法。 他们让我们卖彩票，谁赢了彩票谁就可以得到七年级同学的春季庭院清扫。 斯潘格勒太太住在我的街尾，她中了彩票，春天的第一天，整个七年级的学生都到她家去了。 但所有这些孩子都只有两门课，所以大多数学生最后都无所事事地坐在那里。

And by the time the "spring cleanup" was done, Mrs. Spangler 's yard was worse off than when it started. The new thing the school is doing is these Walkathons. The idea is that we'll walk around the track at school a certain number of times, like one hundred or two hundred laps, and get our neighbors

等到“春季大扫除”结束的时候，斯潘格勒太太的院子比刚开始的时候还要糟糕。 学校正在做的新事情是这些步行马拉松。 我们的想法是，我们会绕着学校的跑道走一定的次数，比如100或200圈，然后让我们的邻居