Cheezer and Louzer

For those who may not know, we run this place.

Wow, there’s a LOT of paperwork to be done with this adoption. We got the packets from our adoption agency and our home study company and they both want more information than I can imagine anyone needing.

For example, they want letters from our employers, doctors, schools, friends, local police departments, ummm, priests, … You get the idea. A lot of work, that will be. Fortunately, most of that doesn’t need to be notarized like the first few forms did. Those per-signature forms add up fast, eh.

Onward we go…

I miss web pages that were each individually designed. Unlike this site and every other site I will visit today, web pages in the late 90’s used to be designed individually and so each page had its own design. Not only that, but each page had its own little quirks and such, like where it differed from the site’s style in some subtle way.

I miss that quirky web and will have to add some pages here to bring it back. Maybe this will be the beginning of a new movement?

I got my Birth Certificates from the registrar in the county where I was born today so that’s one more document I can check off the list. Only about 40 more to go now.

This newspaper story is a good example of why adoption in America has become a less likely option for couples like us. (Sorry about the pop-ups and info boxes on the site)

To summarize, a couple were foster parents to many children, but when they wanted to adopt two little twin boys who were born premature, their County took the boys away from them. The County believed the mother was faking an illness in one of the boys to gain smypathy for herself, but then that little boy died in another foster home. It took a long time still after that for the couple to get to adopt the remaining little boy but only after legal struggles and much pain and heartache.

Is it wrong of us to want to avoid that kind of trouble in our lives and look for a solution that (at least right now) appears simpler and fraught with fewer legal perils? I’ll leave that up to you to decide for yourselves, but I don’t think so. We’ve been through enough, I think.

So, if you didn’t know this already, there is a major injustice in this world and it does not appear to be getting a fix any time soon. If you use the Mozilla Firefox web browser, you may have noticed that you can’t easily listen to song samples at Amazon.com. When you try, Firefox asks you what you want to do with a little file named “hurl.exe”. That happens whether you click on the Windows Media Player link or the RealPlayer link. It turns out there is some sort of imcompatibility between the Amazon site and Firefox and in the end, the browser fails to “get” what the web site wants it to do.

The good news is that you can rename that file and then play the song correctly, but what a f’ing hassle. This is not the way I think Amazon is meant to work and I have to wonder how long we’ll have to wait before they FIX IT!!!

Instructions:
1. Click the link to listen to your song.
2. When FF asks you what to do with the ‘hurl.exe’, save it to your desktop.
3. Right-click over that file and Rename it to either “hurl.asx” or “hurl.ram” depending on whether you wanted to hear the song sample in Windows Media Player or RealPlayer, respectively.
4. Double-click the file to play the song sample.
5. Repeat ad-nauseum for as many samples as you want to listen to.

You can go and check out LINK:50 Foot Wave now with this valuable information at your disposal.

Welll, we received word on June 13th, 2005 that our application for adoption through Chinese Children’s Charities was approved! Now the “fun” begins. After a few days of getting reccomends from people who’ve adopted, we’ve picked a home study agency. (A Home Study is a thorough investigation of the family that wants to adopt – they investigate a family’s emotional stability, financials and personal histories to verify that an adopted child will have a stable, loving home). I’ve already picked up more copies of my birth certificate and our marriage license. Apparently you need to keep on hand, any offical document you’ve ever received- in triplicate, certified original, and sealed in blood….(OK, maybe no blood, that costs extra). Peter needs to obtain more copies of his birth certificate which will take longer, since he was born in Long Beach. Thank godness we now have a fax machine.

Welcome to our adoption diary. We have already started the process of adopting a little girl from China so I will have to post soon on what we’ve done so far… deciding to adopt, picking the agency, completing the application and so on… but tonight I am tired just from setting up this web.