On Strike

I am voicing my support for today's Internet strike.

If you don't know what it's about, please visit: http://sopastrike.com/strike/

Excuse Number Four

This is my third and final post explaining why I was absent from the blogosphere for so long.  For those who might have missed them, here are links to my first, as well as my second and third excuses.

Today's excuse has a lot to do with the fact that we are somewhat in a holding pattern. Basically, we are doing a lot of waiting to see what happens next.

We've had a couple of pretty significant things happen over the past few of weeks.

Most importantly, Danielle started medication.  Although it's really too early to tell if the drugs will make a lasting change in her mood or behavior, the initial signs are promising.  I haven't wanted to say much about it, one way or the other, because I feel like I'm walking around the house constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.  We've seen periods of good behavior before, only to have them end in sudden, overwhelming, and violent explosions.  Medication might be a game changer, or it might not.  It's just too darn early to tell.

Danielle's new therapist made a preliminary diagnosis a couple of weeks ago, but has since changed her opinion and given a new one.  Personally, I think her first opinion was more accurate, but I suppose the official diagnosis doesn't really matter.  Whatever label they want to use, as long as it gets the kid some appropriate help, is fine by me.  In this case, the treatment for both diagnoses is similar, so it probably doesn't matter if Danielle really suffers from condition a or condition b.

So I haven't blogged, because I'm not sure how much I want to say about any of this.  In the past, I've been pretty open about what's gone on, and I'm not sure that the resulting headaches (and child abuse referrals) have been worth it. I'm really torn -- I think the world  needs to see just how bad things can be for adoptive families, but I'm not sure that the personal costs (created by trolls, bashers, stalkers and false abuse reports) make it worthwhile.

Someone needs to tell these stories.  I'm just not sure it should be me any longer.

Excuses Number Two and Three

Today's post will be a second installment of excuses explaining why I didn't blog for so long. Yesterday's excuse put the blame on camping.

Today's excuse will be blamed on work and a lack of privacy.

Although I did have a portable Internet connection with me, I ended up spending the bulk of the Labor Day holiday, and all of the following week, working. My original plans were that I was going to take off early Friday, work from the campground that day, and enjoy a nice three-day weekend.  I'd planned to work from the campground Tuesday-Friday, and then  enjoy another weekend, already set-up and ready to go.

But things didn't work out that way.  Something I'd been working on was launched on Thursday against my express advice.  It's always a bad idea to turn anything brand-new out of the barn on a Friday because people want to have their weekends off, and it's even worse if you do it right before a holiday.  I'd suggested we wait until immediately after Labor Day, but my advice was ignored by the powers that be.

Things started to go really wrong when the campaign we launched resulted in more than forty times the number of responses we expected on the first day.  For every customer we expected, we had dozens more who patiently waited, and even more who gave up and walked away in frustration.

Needless to say, my client's customer was not pleased that we were so woefully unprepared.  On the bright side, our lack of preparation wasn't entirely our fault.  The sales results we were given from last year's program didn't reflect the overwhelming response that we received.

I spent the weekend fixing things, re-allocating resources so that we could handle the load, and by Tuesday morning, the mess was considerably better.  The overwhelming initial response had died down a little, and we had been able to allocate more resources to handling the unexpected rush.  I spent the rest of the week sweeping up the remnants of the mess, preparing reports, and performing a postmortem on what went wrong.

By the following Friday, things had calmed down sufficiently, and I got off work about an hour early.  At that point, I needed the weekend.

Needless to say, since my work situation was completely out of control, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about writing blog posts.  When things were a little quieter, I did think about posting, but it seemed that whenever I wasn't working, I had an audience.  Although FosterEema obviously knows about the blog, my kid, my real-life friends and my family don't know about it.  It's my little secret, and I am trying to keep it that way.

Excuse Number One

As I said earlier, I've been carefully considering what I should and shouldn't say about my recent unexplained absence from the blogosphere.

There are a number of reasons, not all of which I am sure I want to explain, but I'll start with the easiest one:

We went camping for ten days.

Even though we were camping, I had to work almost the entire time we were gone.  Although I was supposed to have Labor Day weekend off, things went awry at work, and I ended up working for a good chunk of the weekend.  I'd previously planned to work the Tuesday-Friday after Labor Day, but the problem at work really messed up my plans.  Still, I managed to get all my work done, despite the fact that we were in a remote area, by forwarding all my calls to my cell phone, and using a wireless, cellular modem for my Internet connectivity.

It worked surprisingly well.  I'm glad we had the foresight to purchase the wireless modem last year, as I would have had to cancel my Labor Day plans without it.

Despite the work crisis, we did manage to have quite a bit of fun.  All of our cooked meals were prepared over the campfire, and we ate pretty darn well.  We consumed more than our fair share of dead cows and baked potatoes, and I made several treats in our RV's oven.  I baked muffins, cupcakes and even a birthday cake for a friend who was celebrating.  (A commercial cake mix and homemade butter cream frosting to the rescue!)

This trip I started to realize that cooking over a fire is really more of an art than a science, and that I'm getting pretty decent at it.  I learned a few things about the characteristics of fire, and that it's not absolutely necessary to have the perfect bed of coals to grill a steak.  Potatoes, on the other hand, do require coals to be completely happy.

Cavemen don't got nothin' on me when it comes to cooking over a fire, that's for sure!

Another big plus was that this camping trip was meltdown-free.  The kid managed to make it for ten whole days without name-calling, throwing temper tantrums, making threats or becoming violent.  Even more amazing, she was actually helpful for most of the trip.

We had a lot of fun, but things didn't always go quite as planned.  Our RV's toilet crapped out quit working on day one, so we had to deal with the inconvenience of having to flush by pouring water into the bowl.  Still, the toilet worked well enough to spare us from a long hike to the campground's restrooms, or resorting to bush-wacking as our not-so-nice neighbors did.

The big thing I learned from this trip was that I can work from the road, even under less-than-optimal conditions.  I was happy to see that I was able to fix our work-related disaster without having to drive home.  When I left, I had a substantial backup plan worked out, just in case.  If my portable Internet connection hadn't worked, I had two other potential Internet hotspot locations lined up.  If those hadn't panned out, then I would have had to drive home.

But it all worked out.  I also learned that having to work from the campground is less fun than having time off, but it's still better than having to cancel a planned trip.  Still, I'm going to do everything in my power to try to avoid work/camping collisions from happening, as it doesn't make a lot of sense to pay for a campsite just so I can sit in the RV and work all day.

So that's my blogging excuse for today.  I'll probably have more, later.

Is Anyone Having Trouble with Mobile Browsers?

A quick administrative note here...

I received an e-mail this morning from a reader who told me she isn't able to view my blog with an iPad.  Specifically, the page displays for a moment, and then her screen goes blank.

I've checked the blog with several mobile devices, and I'm not able to replicate the issue.

Is anyone else having a similar problem with a mobile device?

If you are having trouble, please shoot me a private e-mail.  I'd like to solve this problem, if I can.