Mostly Offline

It’s been one of those weeks around here. One of those weeks where I have been mostly offline. But that doesn’t mean things have not been happening.

Part of the reason has been the bankruptcy debacle of last week. Because we’ve been part of the adoption community for so long, for whatever reason the news of the bankruptcy really affected us. It was weird. Our adoption was completed almost a year ago, and yet it still upset us. We had all sorts of emotions over the situation:

• We were angry at the principals.
• We were devastated for the children and caregivers.
• We were sad for the families involved.
• We spent a bit of time coming to terms with the idea that this may really, definitively close the door on a potential future adoption in our family.
• BDH experienced his first exposure to the international adoption haters, those ignorant, twisted freaks commenting on news stories.
• And I just found myself reading far too much news, adoption or otherwise, online, and it was bumming me out.

I tend to get caught up in the churn of emotions in these sorts of things. And reading other news on top of that? It just bummed me out.

I’ve also been offline to do things in my real life:

• Errands needed to be run, like trips to the grocery store and finding a hairdresser for That Baby. That last one is still up in the air; there seems to be a dearth of hairdressers who know how to deal with African hair in this city of 100,000.
• Chores needed to be done. And, mostly, they still do.
• I walked a lot with That Baby — and, if my stinking cellphone would actually do things that it is supposed to, I’d have photos to show you of Stinkerbelle on the swings on one of those walks.
• I went to the dentist. Just a cleaning, but hey. Nobody likes the dentist.
• And — two of the nicest things of all — I have been doing a lot of knitting and watching How I Met Your Mother and old episodes of Mythbusters. Fun, entertaining, distracting, mindless.

So, what else of note has happened recently? Well, there have been physical injuries:

• Stinkerbelle head-butted me on the bridge of the nose so hard I saw stars and had a headache for days. Her eye socket was mostly unaffected.
• I have been taking super-mega-Advil a lot for the headache pain, which causes me to sleep deeply. And, since I wear a CPAP face mask, this means I have been sleeping in all sorts of contorted positions, and consequently have a crick in my neck so bad I can’t turn my head or lift Stinkerbelle up without doing that old lady sucking-air-through-the-teeth noise to indicate pain.
• And most serious of all… Stinkerbelle’s Auntie Tena took a nasty spill off her bike, banging her head on a train rail and ending up in emergency. She now sports a bunch of stitches and a shiner that Rocky Balboa would envy.

So… that has sucked.

We’ve also had some interesting diversions:

• Trying to keep Zippy the groundhog out of our vegetable patch. We love him, but there are limits to the hospitality which we are prepared to offer.
• Playing ball with That Baby, who loves few things more than to play with The Big Multicoloured Ball. Well, except for…
• Dancing, which is always good.
• Wondering exactly when the battery on my laptop will completely die, and in the meantime, watching it die a slow, madly-flashing death.
• Teaching Stinkerbelle NOT to lick the television.
• Coming up with inventive ways to stretch out ever-dwindling cash to get the most bang for our buck, grocery- and entertainment-wise.

So, yes. Been offline a fair bit. Life has been full.