Between Spring and An Icy Place

Warmer temperatures (and brief rain this evening) means spring is coming...and I finally got out to do laundry and run brief errands I put off on Saturday. I'll be running more errands in the coming days.

I'm trying to work up enough courage to volunteer at local elementary schools and libraries to read to younger kids. Reading to younger kids may have helped save my sanity during one of the worst times of my life, fourth and fifth grade, when my body suddenly started maturing and my brain couldn't catch up with it. The kids didn't care what I looked like or that my math was terrible or my peers thought I was crazy; they liked how I could come up with impromptu stories based after Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, how I made the titular animals in "The Lion and the Mouse" sound deep-voiced and squeaky respectively, and how I could come up with funny games (with the teacher's permission). I've never forgotten how happy I was doing that, and I'd love to do it again.

I don't think I'd make much of a teacher. I couldn't handle little kids all day. That said, I would like to spend a few hours showing them the joys of reading, so that they all have a way to escape that uses one of the most important parts of any person...their imagination.

Problem is, I just don't know anyone around here who is a teacher, and all the libraries I've approached don't need volunteers. I don't know how to ask them, and I'm scared to death about what they'll say when I do ask.

I just need something in my life. I need something to write about, something that doesn't involve sitting in my apartment in the morning, waiting to go to work and be annoyed. There has to be more to life than pushing groceries through a line and listening to people complain!