"The Call"

My wife Sandy and I got "the call" yesterday. Adam Jefferson, the infant boy we are adopting from Guatemala, made it through PGN, which I think is the office of the Attorney General. Now, we are told, it will be 2 1/2 to 3 weeks before we can go get him. We were getting concerned because I have to go to Falls Church, Virginia for the work week beginning January 24, 2005 to be trained on electronic folders, part of the Social Security Administration's strategy to go paperless, and am scheduled to go to San Jose, California to give the training on the following week. Neither Sandy nor I want her to have to make the trip to get him alone.

Because of the uncertainty about when we would get "the call" and therefore when we would have to leave for Guatemala, I plannned not to go to Indiana to see my mother and (older) two children over the holidays. This will be the first time I have done that and miss Thanksgiving in the same year since I moved to Connecticut. Sandy and I plan to take A.J. to Indiana in March.

The Acting Chief Hearing Office Chief Administrative Law Judge sent me an e-mail message at home criticizing the way I have been citing exhibits in hearing decisions for the past 20 plus years. I was not happy, and said so in my reply. It represents the worst kind of upside down priorities and nitpicking. During my vacation, no less.

I am using two weeks of vacation to catch up on my programming degree. I submitted the last assignment in computer organization the day before yesterday and began working with Visual Basic.NET. I need to schedule a final exam in computer Organization before I forget what I just learned. I mean what I learned other than that Boolean algebra can be very confusing because it is and is not (at the same time) like regular algebra. The Visual Studio.NET compiler is a huge monster, eating up a good share of my hard drive, and I suspect a lot of memory when it is loaded. I also found the instructions for installing it confusing. However, when I started working with it, I was impressed with how easy it appears to make it to create a Windows application.

I was also elected chair of the American College of Computer and Information Sciences student chapter of the American Association of Computing Machinery. Great, just what I needed - something else to do.