Evening time. I’m back from teaching class or have sent a client home. The kiddo’s in bed. I try to get a bit more work done, but when I’m honest with myself, I’m mostly futzing online. Which just makes me feel lousy – more brain dead and self critical for time wasted.

I need an evening activity, I tell my better half. I’m too fried to work at this point, but if I go to bed this early, I’ll be up at 2 and miserable tomorrow. Not much of a TV watcher, though we’ve been known to get lost in Netflix on occasion. Not much of a crafter, either, though I’m surrounded by knitters and felters and painters, oh my!

I’m in need of a hobby.

Then one afternoon, we’re at the library renewing our beloved Harold and the Purple Crayon DVD (…I swear, they should just shelf the thing at our house. Two weeks here, then back when it can’t be renewed. Then back home again. I don’t think anyone else ever takes it out. They could just send them over here to watch together. It’d be a way to make new friends. But I digress…) We’re renewing our DVD and I notice a room beyond the Children’s Room. Its full of…books. And I remember. Books! I love to read! There are books on our shelves I  haven’t looked at since moving in, mainly because I don’t bother to dust. Grown up books. Books by authors other than Sandra Boynton and Roald Dahl. Books without pictures!

So I leave my kiddo at the library’s obligatory train table and wander a bit in the stacks. And lo and behold, I make an amazing discovery: some of my favorite authors  have written books in the past 6 years.

So we came home with a book about Volcanoes, Arnold Lobel, MoWillems’ latest, but also Jim Crace, Charles Baxter, and Margaret Atwood’s new collection of short stories. And the Harold DVD, of course.