Jailbreak on April Fewl's

Yes, the craziness has continued. We had a jailbreak today at the Shelter. In order to go to school in the morning, the girls all line up at 9:00 and walk from the kitchen through the office to the classroom. This morning, as the line proceeded to the office, three girls - count 'em: THREE- bolted through the main door and booked it down the street. Major crisis. Books strewn on the driveway...somebody yelling...At the time of the incident, I was trying to lock a drawer in the kitchen that houses scissors, knives etc. because I was getting a pair of scissors for a student so she could finish making a goodbye card for Sue, my coworker, whose last day was today and the lock wasn't locking and I can't leave the sharps drawer unlocked.... How's THAT for a run-on? (No pun intended.) Well, it created all kinds of chaos, the police were called, residents were crying, staff were buzzing around...and the silly girls were caught by police within about fifteen minutes of running. They ended up in some person's BARN down the road! Pretty wild. As I sat with one of the girls later, she said, " How did the police get there so fast?" Matt suggested to her that futuristic technology had arrived, as portrayed in "Minority Report", and that the police had teleported themselves to their hiding place...This girl's pants and socks were all muddy b/c the slippers she had been wearing had fallen off somewhere. ( Sometimes we take certain girls' shoes away and give them slippers if we think they have a risk of running. Huh...I guess slippers are an okay deterrent in blizzard season but not in mud season. In fact, her slippers may have been the ones that I retrieved from the neighbor's lawn later...or no, I think that was one of her accomplices'...I guess said girls' slippers are still at large.) So I got her some new clothes and put her dirty stuff in the laundry. Kind of weird and surreal...a new part of my job description: Paw through delinquents clothes to find matching socks that won't offend said delinquent when you're doing the laundry she grundged up while on the lam. ( She wondered why I picked out the socks that I brought for her...Well, seeing as how I could only find one white sock, I had to opt for the heathered black pair that didn't really match the rest of her outfit.) Fortunately, after initial nastiness and tears, the girl calmed down and actually apologized and seemed contrite and back on the path of righteousness...She is really a sweetheart underneath all the tough exterior... and her problems, and sad family background, which she referred to in the process of talking about the whole incident, made me want to weep for her.

But the spring feverishness has yet to be totally worked out; when I left around 3:30 this afternoon, there was still one 'runner' who wasn't cooperating with the program...

Did I tell you about how there was a knife found in the classroom last week while I was on vacation? I guess not...I think I just referred to the whole time as "Super Bad"-- maybe so that my mother wouldn't read this and get scared. Okay...so I guess there was this girl who brought and stowed a knife in the classroom. And Matt was telling me this when I came back to work on Wednesday and he said that the night before the knife was found, he'd had this dream that he got stabbed...and as he was telling me this, I remembered MY dream from the night before and told him, " Yeah- well, I had a dream that Jesus came back last night!" The idea was, maybe MY dream will actually come true today! Which would have been cool...but it didn't. It was weird, actually, because it was a dream within a dream. I dreamed that I heard music and started rising through glittery air, and knew that Jesus was coming, and then, it all just sort of stopped, and it was like I woke up within the dream and realized that it was just a dream. Anyway...it's Friday...well, actually it's so late that now it's Saturday...How the weekend doth fly.