Emjay

Having confessed my angst over my deteriorating relationship with my computer, I would be remiss in failing to blog about today's Emjay news!! So... while this cursed thing is up and running, with the program already open that I need, I am going to enjoy a brief opportunity to revel in functionality and blog TWICE in a single day -- thereby increasing my recent blogging productivity by infinity plus 2 (it's a product of zero kind of thing...sorry).

Today we signed papers with our two social workers that effectively ended Emjay's foster days -- she is officially no longer in foster care! (She is not, however, officially adopted, this will happen sometime between the last week in February and the first week in March.)

Today Fuego and I met with Emjay's county social worker and our adoption social worker to sign papers declaring our intention to adopt Emjay. While, of course, we intended all along to adopt her, the special significance of today's signing is that the State of California now recognizes Emjay as legally adoptable, and by our signing of today's papers, she has officially transitioned from being in foster care to being placed in her adoptive home.

Of all the years our social workers have collectively been working in adoptions, this was the first time they experienced a couple taking pictures of the signing. Yes, Fuego and I are officially the sappiest adoptive parents they have EVER met. They were, however, great sports about it, and the pictures will go wonderfully in Emjay's life book =o).

With today's signing, and tomorrow's adoptions paperwork from the county (that our adoptions social worker will be bringing for her LAST home visit), we will know by Friday what date has been set for us to meet with a judge to legalize Emjay's adoption and end this first stage of our lifelong journey together. Fuego and I are both ecstatic!

After obtaining the legal stamp of approval, Emjay will be issued a new birth certificate with her permanent name and with Fuego and I as her parents. While this will take about nine months to finally arrive at our home, it has already been VERY exciting to see all the new paperwork bearing Emjay's permanent name -- there's something profound and powerful about getting to name your child and have it actually recognized in legal documents after so many months.

And thus, having ultimately, and with profound finality, shed her "foster-stank," Emjay is preparing, in her newly designated residence of "Adoptive Placement" to be united permanently with her mama Fuego and papa Garnabus!

It has been a journey well worth repeating... which we plan to do in the near future ;o) Stay tuned!

Missing in Action

I have a bone to pick with my computer. When we first started courting, it was responsive, attentive, quick to please, and almost never disappointed me. It did what I asked without reserve and seemed only too happy to perform at optimal level, anytime, day or night -- it was almost as though I could do no wrong by my electronic companion.

Well, as time goes on, things change. Perhaps it feels that I took it's ready screen and responsive processor for granted over the long years of seminary when I took endless pages of notes for countless classes, wrote thousands of pages of papers (no really, thousands), and added programs and updated capabilities so that I could take teleconference classes over the internet from far distant countries. Perhaps it was offended when I insisted on using protection, installing and updating anti-virus software. Perhaps it felt I was cheating on it when I got that first job out of Seminary and came home smelling of another keyboard.

Whatever the reason, my computer is now no longer the computer I brought home. It is inattentive (it takes as long for it to come out of "suspend" as it used to take for it to start up from being completely off), slow to respond (opening any particular program can take as long as two minutes), haughty and condescending (suggests downloading and upgrading programs I've already downloaded and upgraded, and which have been running properly for months), self absorbed and self serving (it doesn't bother asking anymore whether or not I want it to download and install Windows and Norton updates, and sacrifices performance by running these unwanted and untimely updates invisibly in the background).

Out of jealousy, I have begun to spy on my computer -- monitoring those processes in the Task Manager that run in the background and use up the majority of my processor and memory resources.

I have tried reasoning with my computer. I have offered retreats and day spas in the form of registry optimizations, and defragmentations. I have trimmed the fat and improved its diet by removal of extraneous data and unused and unwanted programs. I have offered peace overtures and even suggested counseling by agreeing to the manufacturer's upgrade to internal service monitoring. But, ultimately, I have started to distance myself from my computer. More and more, I find myself simply using my iPhone to email, search the web, get directions, check the weather, and listen to music. My computer probably considers this a slap in the face, the iPhone being younger and sleeker, but I have needs, and the iPhone is quite frankly faster and has a LOT less baggage.

I fear that my computer and I may be approaching the end of our relationship. I'm pretty much just modeming it in at this point. As many of you who have checked my blog with any frequency over the past couple of months can attest, I'm just not online very much anymore, and to be honest, it is simply because I have experienced ever increasing lack of patience with my long-time companion. It just doesn't seem to have any fight left anymore, and for my own part, I don't have the patience anymore to wait for fifteen minutes for it to finally start up and have the program up and running that I need in order to blog (that fifteen minutes is about my whole window of patience for screen time when nothing is working at a reasonable speed).

To compound matters, many of you remember my desperate post about my work computer's attitude of indifference and apathy. I just don't have the strength to fight all day to get anything done, just to have the same problem at home.

Thus, I have resigned myself to ending it with my computer and I am saving up for a MacBook Pro.

The separation may take some time, we've been together pretty long, but I think we'll all be happier in the long run -- and then I can really get back to blogging regularly! It's time to move on with my life (keep telling yourself that, Garnabus, it will get easier with time...)

*sniff*