Oh no. I’ve only been up for 12 hours, so the day is still young! That’s right. It’s ten minutes to one in the morning. I slept around 12 hours last night, not including the 4-hour nap I took Saturday afternoon.

Hey. It’s Solstice. I figure it all balances out. Don’t ask me how.

I found a way to fix the holiday blahs that I had on Saturday. Besides hibernating, although that helped, too.

My friend Kate is in town, and she’s been volunteering the women’s shelter at her mom’s church. I had wanted to provide a dinner or two (the shelter relies on people bringing in meals), but the schedule is full of volunteers for the rest of the season (through March). Which is great news. As much as I wanted to pitch in, I was thrilled that they had a waiting list.

Well, they did have a waiting list. Not anymore. In what might be the worst case of no good deed going unpunished, one of the people who had volunteered to provide many of the meals was laid off from her job on Friday. Such is life at the end of 2008, I guess. One day you’re set to provide food to those without. The next, you could very well be the person in need.

Since I had nothing better to do than mope, sleep 16 hours a day, and dodge phone calls, I signed up to do Monday’s dinner with about 24 hours notice. I must say, even though I stopped catering three years ago this month (how is that possible?), I’ve still got it. Four quiches, two mixed fruit crisps, and a giant salad, knocked out in a little over two hours. Booya.

Brian said it looked like the old days – me, sweating in the kitchen well past midnight, with a window open to let in the 1 degree outside air, cussing at my lack of counter space, and calling my spinach quiche pretty.

It felt good to do something necessary, not frivilous. And then I felt guilty that I was feeling good doing a task I wouldn’t be doing were it not for the misfortunes of others. I know, that’s looking at it entirely the wrong way. It’s good to be excited about doing something positive instead of eating a bag of pumpernickel pretzels in bed at three in the afternoon.

The shelter’s an emergency shelter, not a residence. While I cooked I wondered if some of the women who’ll be eating my food tomorrow night even knew where they would be spending Monday night. If events that would lead them to the shelter had transpired.

We’re making it a family event. Brian and Clara Jane are coming with me. She needs a new audience for her “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” recitals. We’re building it up to be something special, because it is, but that also means explaining homelessness to a kid who’s not even five.

Of course, as soon as I type that, I think that there are a hell of a lot of five-year-olds who don’t need a definition for homelessness because they’re living it.

I don’t know what to expect. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any shelter volunteering. The last time was a year to the day before Clara Jane was born; I helped cook a heart-healthy soul food dinner for Valentine’s Day at a family shelter. There were no big revelations. I cooked, I joked with the kitchen staff. I talked to some of the residents while we ate. I didn’t learn how anyone came to be at the shelter; we just talked about normal stuff.

Kate’s been knitting with some of the women at the shelter. They also play dice games and visit. Tomorrow night, they’ll have another knitting partner and some pre-school entertainment. And hopefully, there will be a family who leaves at the end of the night with a renewed sense of how lucky they are.