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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.

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

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

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.

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.

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