Here I am again, with another adventure behind me. Somehow I managed to kayak seven miles in two days, in choppy seas, with nine high school students, a photographer, and a Maine guide, while also making the kids read Whitman and Addonizio and Clifton and Beston and Dickinson and Hopkins and Tu Fu and Nivyabandi. What a lovely group of human beings they were . . . all of these kids with their hearts on their sleeves, all of them so game about the waves and the water--making rooster noises, and cracking jokes, and slinging teenage slang, but so kind to each other and so wide-eyed about writing and the world. At the end of it all of the kids unanimously announced, "This program should be longer!" So next year it will be.

After devouring a considerable amount of pizza, I fell asleep on the couch at 7 p.m. Now I have woken with a few notable muscle aches, a pile of emails to answer, a ten-week curriculum to write up, a book to finish editing, and a mortgage to apply for. I also still feel like I'm on the sea: my whole sense of balance is up and down and up and down. It's very strange. Maybe I will need to take Dramamine in order to read anything.

Yesterday the house inspector came to check out the new place, and we're mulling over the various insufficiencies he's pointed out--on the whole, nothing too shocking, given the age of the house, but certainly stuff that the sellers will need to address. I still can hardly believe we're so close to having a place of our own.