Early Monday Morning

It's 6:09am on Monday and I am wide awake. Not very odd, considering that last night I never went to bed. It was my full intention to crawl straight into bed after checking my email and reading a chapter of a book, but suddenly the 800 page book I was about 1/3 of the way through was entirely gone, another e-book of about a fourth of the length as the first was open on my laptop, then I was finishing said second book, and I glanced outside and scared myself.

There was sunshine! Light! What was this? It turns out that I still rather thought it was around midnight....when in fact it was a little bit before five. So I finished the last two chapters of still another book while eating my cheerios, and planned out my (very busy) day. So far my schedule is thus:

• Call Amtrak and find out how to refund the tickets that I'm not going to use to get to Eugene this weekend. (done!)
• Go to my mother's house and pick a few gallons of raspberries to turn into jam.
• Make said jam.
• Arrive at my boyfriend's house by noon to talk on Skype with his (foreign exchange student from 2010-2011 school year) sister in Germany.
• Make bread with the boyfriend's brother's girlfriend. (complicated, I know!)
• While the bread rises, print out and write up more fundraising letters, find addresses, address envelopes, and put all of the above in the mailbox.
• Print out information from my college to send off to financial aid.
• Go by my doctor's office, find out where my inhaler prescription went, and get a current order for physical therapy for my back.
• Before 5pm arrive at the post office and put the Amtrak tickets for refund and the college information in the mail on overnight shipping.
• Decide what to make/buy/send my sister & her boyfriend (who are both working in the woods for a conservation corps, on different crews) because the package needs to be sent Tuesday afternoon.
• Clean up my house before bed (bedtime will be no later than 10pm...since I didn't sleep at all last night.)

And I promise that at least three fourths of the things on this list will get done. Really. When I itemize things like this, I actually tend to get results. It is my current hypothesis that when I write out a list of things to do, as long as most of the items have a solid deadline of less than two days away, pretty much everything gets done.

That is why I can be so bad about making baby blankets for people and getting them out within a relatively short time of the baby being born, because the due date is so far away, that my brain thinks that I have plenty of time to complete the task, right up to a week before it needs to be there and my brain finally realizes that it's totally messed up and this project needs to be worked on right now.

So today will be a very full, long day in which crucial tasks to my trip to South Africa (from now on to be referred to affectionately as "Seffrica"). Still stressing me: I need a plane ticket in extremely short order, and have no idea where the cash is coming from. Hopefully the financial resources will show up soon! There's no way that I would have such a strong spiritual pull towards this trip if God wasn't planning on making sure I went on it.

Bless you all.
    Sarah Herbert








 Again, the link for my fundraising letter and donation form is right here. If you don't want or need a tax deduction, the donations can be sent directly to me, if you feel so led, at:


Sarah Herbert
2222 E Isaacs Ave
Appt G102
Walla Walla, WA
99362