It happened today: The ever-dreaded mistake on the Block of the Month. We got the first two distress calls. Kim was out, Cynthia fielded the calls. She looked at the instructions. She realized what had happened: When she fixed a typo in the instructions last week, she accidentally fixed it twice, thus making one part of the instructions correct, and creating a new part that was incorrect.

So before she taught her quilting class tonight, Cynthia fixed the typos, ate a chicken-salad sandwich, printed out 60 copies of the page, ate a brownie, then turned over the printed pages, and printed out the return address on the back of the page so it could be stapled shut and mailed out. (There was only one paper jam during this process. It was a pretty good night for printing.) During her class, she addressed as many of the letters as she could in between helping the people. She was grateful to the class for being good-humored about watching her do this.

After the class left, she finished the addressing. It was now 10:15. Time to get stamps and get the corrections mailed out. She grabbed two $10 bills from the cash register and headed to the Pine Grove Mills Post Office to get this task completely finished by the end of the night so she would no longer have it nagging at her. When she got there, she learned that the machine accepted bills no larger than $5.00.

So she went home, and she and Kevin of Cynthia went to Wal-Mart's postage machine and got stamps. It was now after 11:00. Kevin of Cynthia felt sorry for Cynthia, so when they got home, he put the stamps on all the letters.

Then he suggested that if she wanted, they could go to the Post Office to deliver the letters. After a 13.5-hour workday, Cynthia decided that this was probably a bad idea--although extremely well-intentioned and, on some level, tempting. The letters would not go out any faster anyway.

And so the letters will be posted first thing in the morning, and then, with any luck, the Block of the Month Trauma will be over.

Shop owner's prayer: Please, oh please, let the customers procrastinate long enough to receive the letter before they begin the block.