i'm grown-up and boring -- hooray!

It's a quiet moment in the P.E.D.S. program at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, so a little-known (but soon to be famous) employee named Sarah is snatching a tidbit of precious time to blog...because when she gets home from work, she is too tired to look at a computer screen.

We've been overturning the house at work, have Meg and I, improving the educational environment for the children. Yesterday we rearranged big pieces of furniture (shelving, kiddie tables, kiddie cupboards) to make room for a Reading and Writing Center and a Music Area. We already have a Kitchen, a Workshop, and an Art Studio, and the room is now full of simple and valuable toys. We weeded out a lot of useless or nonproductive toys (or annoying toys) so that there are less toy sets with muliple pieces that just get strewn around and thrown at people. Now the kids have free access to musical instruments, books, a magnetic writing pad, chalk and markers, blocks, Legos, and Play-Doh.

We suffered from so much motivation that we even stayed late to put a few "finishing touches" (when is anything ever finished?) on the room. Normally we wait to do all the major improvements until the last Friday of the month, when we have an "In-Service Day," but most of this stuff we hate waiting for.

Meanwhile to make up for a huge sleep deficit stemming from the beginning of July, I have been going to bed at 9:30 every night this week and sleeping until seven in the morning. I'm beginning to feel, for the first time in forever, great. I think. It's been so long that it's hard to tell.

Monday and Tuesday night I read big chunks out of Angels and Insects, which I find fantastic. Last summer I decided to love A. S. Byatt no matter what, and we are very compatible as a writer-to-reader team.

AND Louise Erdrich is coming out with a new novel in September. Excitement, rapture, joy.