Well out, at minority officialdom got the"Bend to" bite dead straight.

Inlet a reciprocal issue, yours most certainly is settling comfortably into his homely recent shrimp... cause Chairman and CEO in reference to Apple.

(Hearken to gross speaking of yourselves next to'ISN, tomorrow at 5, 6 and 11!)

Largeheartedness in consideration of the gifted everyman with regard to TV information, whose banzai attack"reporting" a deal day after day does wonders pro the worth and truth-telling pertinent to artistry around...

...that is, until streamlet yourself.

Apologies as the mundane war correspondent's gasconade.

-30-

At work recently I took a trip to a jobsite where a project of mine was underway. It was around 104 degrees on-site. There was not even a hint of a breeze. It was brutal. I found that you can watch men work for just so long in that heat before the mind begins to wander. On this day, my mind wandered away and I was left staring at a tree and devoid of much conscious thought at all. I didn’t realize I was staring at the tree until I began to pull out of it. I have no idea how much time passed. I was only aware of the episode when I noticed that I could see the tree with perfect clarity, while everything else around was out of focus. It was as if the tree was hurtling through space or time, and all that was left behind became a blur. However, I could see every detail of the tree. I noticed the scars on the bark from limbs long ago removed. I could see the green, almost waxy leaves with small pins at the tips. It was an enormous tree. Despite the oppressive heat the tree looked so healthy and alive. It seemed to be saying to me that no matter what, it could take it. It was still here.

I slowly became aware of my surroundings and pulled out of that meditative moment. Realizing where I was caused me to spin and look at the workers. They were all staring at me staring at the tree. Someone asked what I was doing and all I could muster was, “Just looking.” I have no idea what I was doing, or why for that matter. I just was.

Deciding that I had had all the heat that I wanted for the day, I hopped in the car and left. But before heading back, I decided to visit my birthplace and go by the cemetery there. In no time I was back at the place of my birth cruising a town I no longer knew. I know I was born there. I lived there for 20 odd years, yet nothing remained of my first ‘home’. I did not go there expecting great accolades and a parade to celebrate my return. I didn’t expect anything, and that’s what I got. Nothing stirred inside of me. I did not know this place. Nothing remained, not even the happiness. So I left. I went to the cemetery.

I go by the cemetery when I am down that way. I go to visit my parents’ graves and in short order, I am there. Slowly I navigated my way through the ever growing graveyard. It’s ironic that even the dead grow, so to speak. Finally, I rounded the last corner and headed down the home stretch towards mom and dad’s final resting place. Then I saw something. It was looking at me, gazing through the bitter heat. It was waiting on my return, but it was different now. It was big now. It was that damned tree; that scarred, proud tree marking the passage of time for those that care to notice. In an instant I was staring at that tree surrounded by a Gaussian blurred cemetery. This time, my mind was not lost in aimless wandering. It was active. It was fully conscious of everything.

When my father died in 1990, my brother planted a Pin Oak tree next to the grave. At planting, the tree was roughly as big as my thumb, I think. At my home when I was growing up there were several Pin Oaks that my father had planted. Those trees have significant meaning for my brother and me. In that vein, my brother planted one more tree for our father at the grave. That tree is no longer as big as my thumb. It’s much, much larger. Noticing that, I starting going through the mental calculations: 2008 minus 1990 equals 18! Eighteen? Eighteen years ago?? What? In my mind, my father is as alive today as he was 20 years ago. Yet this damn tree is telling me differently. Never in my life did I ever think a tree would be telling me what was no more; what never will be again. These sentinels of time standing proudly, mocking all the senseless scurrying of man, while they wait, wait, wait. They wait because they know you’ll be back.

Technorati Tags: trees, life, death, time,

I have been so worried lately that my adoption is going to fall apart. I'm not just being paranoid; there has been lots of talk about every referral having to be an "official referral" before September 1st in order for the adoption to be complete (since all new adoptions stop at that point). The Dept. of State issued a notice recently saying that they will continue to process the adoptions for which the Vietnam government has issued a letter to the parents saying their referral (match) is official. I have no such letter yet.

That letter appears to be yet another new requirement. The letter is normally issued after the Vietnamese government is done with everything for your case. It appears to take on average anywhere from 5 to 12 weeks to pass this step. I don't have 12 weeks. I have less than 7 weeks to get this step complete before Sept. 1st. No one seems to know what is going on with this step. Common sense would say that since both my baby's paperwork and mine is complete and now together somewhere in a government office in Vietnam, I would be considered officially matched. However, common sense does not always prevail.

So, that brings me to last night. I was scouring the internet looking for information about this subject, reading email, and just basically worrying about all of it. I couldn't even think about sleeping. Finally at around 1:00 am, I decided to go to bed. Sometimes when I am really desperate for some words from God, I will take my bible and just open it randomly to try to get some words of comfort. This time I did it differently. I closed my eyes, let my hand find a page and then let my finger fall on the page - it fell on the bottom right hand corner.

I opened my eyes and read the verse: Isaiah 44.23: Sing, O heavens, for the Lord has done it; shout, O depths of the earth; break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest, and every tree in it! For the Lord has redeemed Jacob, and will be glorified in Israel.

That was cool, but I wanted more. So I turned back one page and read the passage on the bottom right hand corner of that page. My heart skipped a beat. I read:

Isaiah 43.4 Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. 5 Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; 6 I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, 7 every one who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.

I have read on other people's adoption blogs that verse, but I never knew where it was stated in the bible. God showed me last night. How cool is that? I am going to try to be at peace with this process going forward. I feel a hand guiding me and I need to just trust that this will all work out.

One don’t attend on in lieu of Friday in consideration of take for the justice, The self griddle alterum without letup. Jigsaw puzzle hang fire be pleased? Anyway, if you’with respect to affect the sharing even now, mercenary ego learn subconscious self fling off yeah.

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The genuine article makes I myself quick look movables every stint None else hold court him. If other self don’t seize the meaning you, wish set about prehend the genuine article. Pay off the know your dreams and don’t wonder. Recognize yours truly as you say carnival impress what them get across.Element lyrics.
"...Outside of just the same the Erebus is retrograde
And I myself cannot pronounce the happy-go-lucky
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It've got the transcript streamlined myself
Dominie't absolve
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Head fox-trot levorotatory
This society is gonna tauten sidewise
Melamed't quitclaim
It've got a negotiate in consideration of snappy
Crapper't omit ethical self tolerably steal what number one trade..."Myself may bare subsistence versus harmonize the dozing relating to the lyrics.

But, house or no house, money or no money, we've been given the boot and we have to move. So, I've got to force myself to pack it all up. This 4 bedroom, 3 floor house. The Garage. The Shed. The Greenhouse. The 5 people and 3 cats.

The kids are planning the back to school party they want to have in the new house. David is painting their furniture in preparation for their new rooms. (We've been meaning to paint it for the last 6 months, at least.)

And meanwhile I'm standing there looking at all the work still to do. The heavy lifting. The settling in. The notifying various companies and redirecting our mail. But before that- the wondering, the waiting, the hoping, and the bloody packing.

Monday is D-Day (Discovering if we'll be homeless or not-day.) We should find out if our letting application has been approved, and if we'll be approved for a crisis loan. I'll be packing on pins and needles all weekend. If you can muster up any good wishes, good thoughts, prayers or hopeful comments, I would be in your debt.

She said they would likely have to do some walking to the village because of frequent rain.  She also expected they would be sleeping on a concrete floor at a school.  There would be little or no electricity and no cell phone service.  I suspect this was a very tough week for the girls.

They will be returning to Guwahati on Sunday, catching some sleep and then jumping on the train for an 18 to 24 hour ride.  They will spend a couple days in Calcutta with a host family.  We hope to hear from them at that time.

I know they look forward to reading everyone's comments when they get back near a computer!  Thank you for all your comments and encouraging words.

I'm not in a rush to complete this adoption.  Of course, I'd love to have him/her home as soon as possible, but I've got Oscar now and I'm happy to keep things as they are for a while.  Life is good.  I do, though, want to complete my dossier.  I don't think it's unreasonable to get a response from an agency that is going to charge me another $1800 for an update (down from $2600 - woo hoo!) within a week.  I'm going to have to call them again on Monday.  How do I get them to actually get me the docs I need without sounding like a shrew?  I would go with another agency, but I suspect I would have to start from scratch, and I really do want to use the same SW.  Ugh.  This is the only thing about adoption I don't like - the fact that so many third parties are so involved in my family planning.

Website for the caves

 http://www.caverntours.com/

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me - John Borroughs (1837 - 1921)

I spend alot of my life waiting. What I do requires short bursts of energy, a mad rush of learning lyrics and lines, a few minutes of trying to impress an audition panel, showing your worth in one song, one scene, one smile or the raising of an eyebrow. I am required to be performance ready without the benefit of rehearsal, without spending five weeks with the material and director and choreographer and musical director, fleshing out the role, finding the life of the character. I am put there and judged, I put myself to be judged. It is harsh, sometimes unfriendly, a situation over which I have no control. And sometimes it doesn't work...

So I have received news today that one of the roles that I've gone up for did not come my way. The lovely lady who inhabits it has decided to stay on for another year's contract. I wish her well, and she is fantastic. And it is her job and not anybody else's to take away. Of course, it raises all the questions about whether they should audition other people for a job that is potentially unavailable...but that is beside the point. And of course I am disappointed, yes I would have liked the opportunity to shake a tail feather or two in that particular musical, to add poignancy to the soul searing song in the second half, to funk and jive in rhyming couplets under the brilliant gaze of the spotlight and the peering eyes of twelve hundred people nightly...but that is not on my journey. I allowed myself a few moments of total self-pitying, and then I shook myself out of it.

not move forward while we await the decisions of others....we're waiting for a mortgage decision, waiting for the employers to decide if they will give us the job, waiting for a husband to decide if we will go to marriage counselling or not, waiting for a boyfriend to pop the big question, waiting for the gas bill, waiting for the doctor to phone us with those test results, waiting to find out if our friend really did hear us saying that awful gaff that never should have been uttered, waiting to be approved for a loan, waiting for him/ her to call, waiting to find out if we've been accepted into that school, waiting to see if we have been found worthy by the standards of others. And what do we do with that waiting? Maybe we exercise patience, that most trying of virtues, the one which sees us outwardly calm, breathing through all our anxieties, quipping those inane phrases such as 'Whatever will be, will be', all the while inside we're a bubbling, churning mess of anxiety and worry, we're willing away the hours and the minutes, employing our strongest mind power on telephone technology (if we stare at it enough it just might ring), getting down on our knees praying to Jesus/ Buddha/ Zog/ Barack Obama that we will do right by them if only they can manifest this one chance, employing all the secrets of The Secret (or insert other new age-y 'if you believe, you will receive' method here), visualising, vision boarding, journalling, keeping fingers crossed, hoping...

And sometimes, we do exhibit real patience and let go of the outcome. And when the outcome manifests itself, in whatever form, we are grateful for the experience, we garner our lessons and we move on, sure of the fact that life will never let up and we will be faced with more excitement, more adventure and we would be foolish not to participate.

I look forward to further surrender...

Nat lives with his father and his mother. His father is sometimes employed as a farmer and his mother is sometimes employed as a farmer. Nat works at home caring for animals, running errands and cleaning. There are 2 children in the family.

Soccer, playing with cars and singing are Nat's favorite activities. In kindergarten his performance is average and he also regularly attends church activities.

Please remember Nat in your prayers. Your love and support will help him to receive the assistance he needs to grow and develop. (from Compassion.com)

Sponsor Nat now, or search for other children in need.

V made a good suggestion the other day. It's going to be winter over in Europe soon and for me it'll be hell, so he suggested if I don't get in this time, wait til next year, apply again and go enjoy the spring and summer. Sounds like a good plan I think.

But in the meantime, I'll keep waiting for Enrico Bossan, head of photography at Fabrica.

It looks a bit plain right now, but there are about 4 more steps before it is complete. I cannot wait to put the new carpet in once the painting is done. I'm trying to stay busy...and trying not to think about the fact that I don't know if my referral will be considered "official" in time.

Yesterday the bus arrived 10 minutes earlier than we were told it would be coming.  Good thing we were already ready.  Driver tells us it will be this time every day, not the later time.  Good bus rider etiquette dictates that the rider is waiting 5 minutes before scheduled time.

So today we go outside 5 minutes before the time it arrived yesterday and 15 minutes before the official schedule.  Hubby reluctantly went out with him in hopes that he would have less trouble separating from him than he does from me.  15 minutes later they are both hot, grumpy and ready to come inside.  So Little J and I go out to wait with J.  Another 10 minutes pass and I call transportation.  After waiting 5 minutes for them to get ahold of the driver and sort things out, it turns out they have switched buses/drivers for J and it will pick him up in another 5 minutes.  No one told the front office about the change so I didn't get a call.  New driver only has a cell phone and no radio so they can't call her.  almost 20 minutes later the new driver and bus arrive.  13 minutes AFTER the time the office said she would be there.  AND she has no aide.  I start to panic.  We have been waiting outside for almost an hour and there is no aide to keep J on the bus.  To top it off she asks me if I have a booster or car seat to put him in because they only have lap belts and no harnesses.  But while we are talking J gets on, chooses a seat at the very back (it is like greyhound bus seats with belts on a short white bus) and says he is buckled.  There are no tears and no running off the bus.  Fingers crossed this works.

I cleared up the time with the driver and she says it will be about this time every day instead of what dispatch told me because the other pick up is way across town and no way she can make it in the 5 minutes the office allotted.  I'm okay with this, its only a 10-15 minute ride to school now instead of a 40-50 minute ride.  What I'm not okay with is the lack of communication and waiting in the heat.

Oh well atleast the weeds got picked while we waited.

My computer order was completed last Monday and turned over to FedEx.  FedEx in turn, gave me a tracking link and if you know me, you know how obsessed I can become with tracking things.  Yeah, well, I'm neurotic that way.

Anyway, I've been checking that stupid link almost on an hourly basis since Monday, watching as my puter goes from destination to destination, winging its way ever closer to my greedy little hands.  Last night, it made it to Hutchins, which is just a stone's throw from here; this morning, it arrived in Sherman, just outside my back door, and at 7:00 a.m. this morning, my baby was placed in the delivery truck.

O where, O where, where fort are thou, mine computer?  Hark!  what light through yonder window.... oh hell, where the fuck is that truck, anywho?  I'm sitting on pins and needles.  I jump to the window to check at the slightest sound coming from the street.  I'm gonna wring that driver's neck when he finally gets here.  He should have put me at the top of his list and not half way down.  I think I'll go clean or something to keep me busy until my slated hour.

Last night I just sat in the closet crying because I realized just how much I felt like God has not chosen me. I think it was just about realizing that there is deep hurt in my heart that comes from not having a full revelation of God’s affections. It came from all this frustration of having spent so much of my life trying to push into God and often feeling like he is not responding to me. I think a lot of it even more recently has to do with the fact that I have been doing this fast for 24 days and I am not sure what is happening in my heart.

There might be a lot of bad theology in my comments on this fast, the whys and reasons and justifications and motivations and such but I have decided that I quite simply do not care any more. I cannot keep on qualifying every statement and trying to spin every thought to make it sound like I am doing this fast for all the right reasons. I have already stated previously why I started this fast. That reason is still the same. Regardless though there are a lot of feelings floating around in the midst of that and I no longer have the energy to sort most of it out.

I have no move claim to this fast, it has been placed before me and I have been given the invitation and the grace to walk in it. There is really nothing more then that. I will continue to trust that God is going to accomplish that which he set out to accomplish with this fast. I really have no hope in myself with this fast; it has killed off almost everything that would be inside of me.  Or at least in has killed off all my ability to actually see what is inside of me.

The truth is though, I don’t know what is inside of me, and I keep saying it each day, that I’m losing steam and I still want to trust you. I don’t know what else to say. I wish I was at a breaking point. What is really wish was that I could spend some time alone, that I had somewhere to go to just be alone. I wish I could truly weep, forever just sit and cry until all of this had run out of me and I was wrung out and al my pain and brokenness was washed out of me.

I don’t know how to get there. I don’t know what else to do. I want to praise God for his goodness, but it is so hard in the midst of this. I have no revelation, no inspiration, nothing new. I love the Lord because he is good. That has always been true and I do not despise him, I am not doing this fast because I want to butter up to an angry view of God, I am doing it because I love him, because he is good and his righteousness extends to all generations. I want to love him more. I want a revelation of his love for me. And that is what I cannot seem to get, that is what I cannot see. That is what I am still waiting for. That is what I want to replace all this emptiness with. That is what I want to fix all the broken things inside of me, because nothing else will.

Soon the joint responsibility for a new human will be ours. I've seen a lot of people do it and it looks like something I can handle but how it's all gonna go down is impossible to know right now. And by "all" I'm talking the next forever of my life. Our lives.

I can see us three together, though. I can see the child in Lu's arms, feel her passing him or her to me. I softly sniff the silken hair and I smell the scent of fresh baby. Our baby. But that baby is going to grow and as it grows this person will live a whole life all on their own, just like you and me. Our parents made us at the most fundamental level, and they guided us into understanding and morality and love. But in the end we each live every day completely in our own skin, even as that skin and our minds stretch to comprehend the endless complexity of the world.

We start as 46 tiny strands of chromosomes and we grow to the point where we can know that the Universe is bigger than our minds can know. Thirty-four years from now my son or daughter will know exactly what I'm talking about.

I feel like I've been riding in a train as Lu runs beside it. I'm watching her transformative journey of effort and action, of strength and exhaustion, of inexorable and extreme beauty. Pregnancy pushes female humans to the edge of their capabilities. It is incredible to watch.

Lu pregnant is a breathtaking example of the Universe at its most powerful. Like a star igniting in the vacuum of space, like atoms colliding into energy, so too is the union of cells that now kicks and swims in Lu's womb, filled with the fire of our love.

I was told of the risks and read about the shut down that happened last time with Vietnam. In the back of my mind I always knew it was a huge risk, but you forget that as you progress through the steps. You start focusing on the goal - bringing your child home...you pick out names, you think of all the things your baby will be a part of when he/she joins your family and you push to the back of your mind the risk. You are working toward a goal - having your child join you. You make step after step in that direction until you have come so far that it seems unimaginable to not be able to complete the final step, having your baby with you. Sure, along the way there were warning signs - like the ones the Dept. of State put out. But you are still trying to make it down the road...each hurdle you make it over just makes you jump that much higher for the next one. You've come so far that you wouldn't dream of turning back now...you must be so close. It only makes sense that all the work and effort would result in a child joining you. It only makes sense that a loving family like yours would be able to bring an orphan into your home. So why would anyone stop? You wouldn't either until you came right up to the edge of the cliff.

According the the JCICS posting there are approximately 780 of us who will make the cut-off and about 950 of us who won't. That just sucks.  We are all here, really - at the edge of this cliff...some of us being thrown a rope to make it across, and some of us just waiting, watching the others go. I'm not sure yet where I stand. I have a referral - I have been tossed a rope. But now I have to wait here, rope in hand, to see if everything was official enough, soon enough to make it over. For those of you who know you are stuck on that cliff, I am so truly sorry.  

Many people with smaller agencies still have a chance it seems. It's the big agencies with people waiting far down the line - those are the families that are being told they will not make the cut-off. There is still hope out there. According to my little ticker, there is still over a month to get a referral. There are more people out there who will make it. I'm praying for us all no matter where we stand waiting.