On Saturday evening, I played one of the hottest open-air gigs ever: 90 degrees in the shade at the end of September in central Maine. But then Tom and I had a lovely noisy talky overnight in Wellington. And in the morning we stopped in Skowhegan to buy $600 worth of house paint and drove south via Waterville, where we stopped to look at the Marsden Hartley show at the Colby College Museum. For dinner we had mushroom risotto with a passel of honey mushrooms my friend Steve had picked for us. And then we fell asleep in sweaty exhaustion.

Today will be different. I'll be spending two workdays at the Telling Room, doing various inservice-y things with the other teaching artists. I'm a bit anxious about leaving my desk, where I am juggling back and forth among five different projects, with subjects as varyied as "politics in Tanzania," "getting a job on Wall Street," and "how is Walt Whitman like the founder of Mormonism?" I'm also a bit relieved to be leaving my desk. My brain is tumbling with other people's necessary facts.

So, as a break, today and tomorrow I'll have a 9:30-to-3 job, almost sort of like a regular person's, if that person went to work late and came home early.