We had a good little storm yesterday, quite a bit of rain. I’d scheduled that day to go out to one of my coworker’s homes and do some telecom work. She’d moved and since she works from home, my company had ordered a phone and fax line for her, with DSL on the phone line. A week later her private home line was to be installed, but it turned out there was only room for two lines in the unit. We canceled the fax, but the phone company wanted $150 to come out and change over a bit of wiring. I used the occasion to buy a piece of equipment that I’ve always wanted: a telco phone set with alligator clips. With that I was able to easily connect to every line in the apartment building if I needed to and call my cell phone in order to check the originating number. Could easily be used for nefarious purposes, but in my case it let me get my job done in all of 15 minutes. Squatting in the pouring rain. Luckily I was able to borrow an umbrella (someone here actually owned one!) and prop it between a bush and the wall of the bulding, with me under it.

Last night we went to a foster-care support group meeting. I’m not sure we’re quite in the position to need support yet, since we haven’t had a child placed with us, but it was good to go and talk to the other parents, several of which have had multiple kids. The meeting facilitator was quite a character. I couldn’t place him, culture-wise. He was a grandfather and wore a really nice black turtleneck and had a large ornate silver ring on each hand. I think he was definitely in the role due to his enjoyment of being with people rather than formal training, although he may have had it. I think I’ll call him our “foster care mystic” since his approach was sometimes one that didn’t require sentences to be finished. We watched a video about attachment issues, and one interesting thing was the position of the psychotherapists and neuropsychologists that nature and nurture work very closely during early development, so much so that it is nurture that allows the unfolding genetic material to be implemented. They identified joy and positive exitement as being important, that things like tickling provided a good context for proper dopamine regulation. Etc.

Yes, many of the posts that showed up back-dated to the last 8 days weren’t really written in the past. I’ve been working against some kind of curse. Twice in the last month I created long, multi-subject blog entries, and both times, when I went to post, got a session-timeout message for my troubles and lost everything. So my brother suggests that I use Bloggar, and on the day that I really sit down and recreate as much of my previous writing as I could, my whole office gets hit with a grid-wide power outage and I lose it all again. What are the chances? So tonight, using Bloggar, I’m compulsively hitting ’save’ every couple of sentences, not that they’re all that valuable, but I think I’m running the risk of massive disk failure now. When one tries to buck ones fate, some big stones sometimes have to shift to move you back on course. I’m thinking that if I build in enough redundancy and care into getting these posts online, maybe I can bring about Armageddon. Or at least knock the internet off-line. I was complaining to Daniel, and he said “All the forces of darkness vs. your determination to post…” Yeah, either that or all the forces of light. We’ll see. He’s hoping I at least get a chainsaw-hand out of the bargain. You’ll have to figure that one out.