Wishing everyone a Happy New Year. May this one be better than the last!

Happy New Year - 2009

It was a sad weekend in our household. Our foster daughter, who has been with us for a year and a half, will be returning to her parents today. We hope we’ll have the chance to see her again, but nothing is certain.

Alaxis

Tonight Aaron will be leaving for Las Vegas to spend the holidays with his bio-dad. Yesterday he started packing:

Aaron: Yes! All my Rock Band stuff fit in the suitcase. The guitar, the drum set, the microphone. . .

Me: Were you able to fit any clothes in there?

Aaron: Oh yeah. . I’m going to pack those next.

Amber is home for the Holidays!

Amber is a freshman at Lesley University in Cambridge MA. She will be home for 5 weeks.

Amber’s Favorite Quote: “Your Face!”

Amber (right) being a lovable dork on Halloween

I’ve had this blog for 4 years now and I often get one or two posts that get a ton of comments and traffic.

This year its been this post: Alcohol.

For those who don’t like to click on links (thats most of you I’ll bet), its just a funny “motivational poster” featuring the girl that plays Hermione in the Harry Potter movies posing with a bottle of Corona. I posted in in November of 2007. Here’s the image:

For reasons unfathomable to me, this post not only gets legitimate comments on a regular basis, but also attracts a huge amount of spam comments (my spam filter catches most of these). I assume that this post appears on a google search or something, because these people don’t stick around to read my brilliant prose. They just comment on this dumb picture and then leave.

A sampling of comments:

I think Hermione is really a bad influence to young children if they ever see this but I do think this is damn sexy and I would love for her to hang out with me we would have a blast of magical fun.

. . .This would be creepy but the commenter was a woman. Nah, its still creepy.

wot next shes gonna do crack 4 the camera

. . .Because we all know drinking leads directly to crack use.

wat the flip is “Hermione”?!?!

. . . Obviously never seen the Harry Potter movies or Books.

who cares its america and people need to unwind whether its drinking or lighting up a fat doobie. yeah its bad for you health but we are all gonna die anyway so….
CHEERS!

. . . Also has never seen the movies or read the books. . . You realize she’s British, right?

About 4 months ago, Original Cindy had surgery. It was a difficult operation and it took her 3 months before she could get around without a walker or wheelchair. Eventually she was able to get up and about and she is mostly recovered. . . except. . .

She still has an open wound. Its smaller than a dime and about as deep as half a dime. Considering that the original wound was about six inches long and 3 inches deep, she has certainly come a long way. The problem is the damn wound won’t heal.

It took 3 months for the wound to go from 6 inches to about half an inch. But its been a month now, and wound has persistently refused to close any further. It is still leaking goop, so I have to change the bandages every day. The wound specialist she sees every two weeks keeps burning and cutting the inside of the wound in order to prod it into healing. . . but the friggin’ thing won’t heal!

International Red Cross delivers more medical supplies to the Connor's residence

We go through bandages, saline solution, and medical tape like Dick Cheney goes through hunting partners. The constant removal of medical tape has made he skin around the wound look worse than the wound itself. We are both fairly frustrated. All we can do is hope.