Post-holiday update

It's been a while since I've updated. I've been pretty busy, plus I just haven't been inspired to talk about my life much. Hopefully I'll see some forward movement soon.

Thanksgiving dinner was a culinary success. I cooked four dishes: miniature crawfish patties and duck sausages for appetizers, collard greens and creamed parsnips. In our family we never use the words "cooking from scratch" because that's just always the way we do things. So I didn't actually kill the duck, but I did make the sausages from sheep intestine casing, duck thighs, pine nuts and port wine. It was a lot of work but it really paid off! The duck sausages lasted on the plate for about 30 seconds and everyone absolutely loved them. There's nothing like fresh savory sausages. I won't go into detail as to how I made them, but if anyone is really interested in making their own (it's not that expensive) just drop me a comment.

My CMS website is finished. And, I gave my job hunting seminar. The audience was small, but hopefully I'll give it again to a larger one, because I'm really happy with it and the content is very useful.

The adoption front is slow and depressing. I actually do think of it as a "front", mostly a cold front, sometimes a WWI type of front if I'm in an especially dark mood. Recently we decided not to go forward with an application for a child, because we received additional info that they had suffered from severe sexual abuse and were sexually acting out. It's not like we were the only choice for a family, but we ducked out early on. With other kinds of abuse and neglect you can sort of put yourself in their shoes and imagine what it was like and, from that basis, what it would take to move forward and get past it. Imagining is nowhere near the reality, but at least it's something. For severe sexual abuse and sexual acting out, if I try to think in that pattern, flashing sirens go off in my brain, my stomach starts tying itself in knots and I start wanting to bang my head against the wall to make the bad thoughts go away. Arrgh. We came to an agreement, we would find it almost impossible to deal with that kind of sexual acting out. I'm glad there are people out there who can handle and redirect that behavior but I don't think I'm one of them.