Been long time gone

I'm coming back to the land of the living.

I have, as my friends can attest, largely dropped off the face of the earth, due to the most snakebit development project I've ever been a part of. On this three-month project...well, my whole adoption experience turned out completely differently than we'd expected and cost me three and a half weeks of work, and the second guy on our three-man team decided it wasn't fun to commute to Houston from Atlanta after all and quit, and then Hurricane Rita shut down our test servers for a week, and the girls' visas came through six weeks earlier than expected which was wonderful except that I had to go get them right then rather than after the project had gone live and that was another week lost, and when I finally was cleared for system testing my whole family including me got hit with a nasty flu-like virus and I spent most of that week in the basement trying to system-test in between bouts of narcolepsy with a brain functioning at about 80 on the IQ scale. But all of that pales in comparison to the fact that the new guy we brought in to replace the guy who quit, lost his wife in a car accident a couple of weeks ago and has since then been trying to figure out how to be a single dad to his two-year-old daughter. Just when you think your life really sucks, something like that happens to somebody in the next cubicle.

But we successfully went live last night, at last. And it was a red-letter day for other reasons as well. Yesterday I signed a lease that will let my family move to Katy a month from now, meaning that my year and a half of seeing them only on weekends is almost over. Our real-estate agent thinks she has high-probability offers on the house we're trying to sell, and they are offers at a price we are happy to live with. And yesterday Sally's therapist told us that she has progressed so spectacularly far in dealing with her Ambivalent Attachment Disorder, that in his opinion she no longer needs to come in regularly to see him.

So a whole bunch of burdens lifted yesterday. I didn't wake up this morning until almost 11:00.

Well, in the next couple of days I'll check back in on the PAKK list from which I've been absent for weeks and start catching up on all the threads I've missed, and I'll write a full adoption update, and I'll start scheduling payments to pay back the generous individuals who loaned us money to help get the girls home, and I hope Jim and Candace are still willing to pick up the discussion on religious metaphors. My sincere apologies to all the friends I've neglected, and especially to my long-suffering wife, who too often has been made to feel that my work is more important to me than she is. She deserves better than that.

It's been a good year, what with bringing the J's home and all. But I hope I never have another one like it...