Road trip We got what we were after this weekend. Which was a new copy of our marriage certificate, with the official seal of the State of New Jersey, and authentication of that seal by the Guatemalan Consulate in New York, as required to solve the adoption glitch How we got it: 1) Drive from Boston to Trenton, NJ, on Memorial Day. Lots of rain on the way, otherwise an uneventful journey. 2) Stay in Marriott hotel in Trenton. Pretty new place, pretty nice. Ate dinner and breakfast there, otherwise mostly slept. 3) Get up Tuesday morning and go to NJ vital stats office. We were the second in line at around 8:30 a.m., when it opened. Get document in about a half-hour. 4) Drive north to New York City, arriving around 11 a.m. at the consulate on Park Avenue South 5) Drive car in circles looking for parking while my wife takes document in to be authenticated. 6) Get call from wife -- document is ready already 7) Pick up wife at consulate (have not yet stopped car since Trenton) and head north again 8) Get to adoption agency at Waltham at around 3:30 p.m. 9) Agency sends doc to Guatemala via FedEx 10) Go home and crash Any questions?

Kicked Well, we got kicked out of PGN. OK, that may not mean much to most of you, but we actually know quite a few people who understand this now. PGN is the attorney general's office in Guatemala, which must process all adoption applications. Ours got "kicked out" on Friday, which means we need to submit more paperwork before the adoption can be approved. It is common for this to happen, but when your application has been there 5 weeks already, this is not pleasant, to say the least. In our case, we have to supply a new copy of our marriage license. The one we submitted dated back to just after we were married, 14 years ago. So on Monday we will be driving to Trenton, NJ, to be ready to get a new copy when the state offfices open Tuesday. A rainy Memorial Day weekend ending with a trip to Trenton. Hey, it doesn't get much better than that.

The wireless Interstate Philip Greenspun writes on some of the things free wireless access for all Americans might yield. Interesting. He mentions all the benefits the lack of tolls and tariffs within the U.S. has brought. It made me think a little about the Interstate highway system. Launched in the Eisenhower days (those crazy wild liberal days of Joe McCarthy, etc) it is one of the biggest government projects ever. Though I'm a big fan of railroads and am not a fan of urban sprawl, there's no denying that the interstates were one of the engines of economic growth in the 1960s. Our taxes helped build them, but a great bulk of their maintenance does come from the gas taxes paid by truckers. Can't we do better for the Internet than the outrageous wireless access fees some folks are charging. Here in Arlington, Massachusetts, some folks are trying to get free Wi-Fi access up and down the main drag, Massachusetts Avenue. And they are making progress. There are two coffee hangouts near me -- Starbucks, where you pay for wireless access, and Panera, where it is free. If I'm out and about with my laptop, I know where I'm headed. (This link from Dave Winer)

Yard sale madness This morning we hit what was probably about a dozen yard sales looking for kid-related items, and that's if you count a neighborhood yard sale as one. We got some good stuff, including a fairly good glider chair for $10 and a Trek bike trailer for $125. I really wanted the latter because it will give us a nice way to get out and get some exercise with our new boy. After that we went looking for furniture for his room, without finding something we were sure we wanted. We went to the giant Jordan's Furniture in Natick (nice stuff, but a lot of it pretty pricey). If you have never been to this store, however, you have to go just to see it -- the inside has this bizarre looking New Orleans street, with a maze of showrooms off of it designed to get you lost and disoriented enough to buy something out of sheer panic. I usually hate to shop but shopping for things for a new son is a lot more fun than normal. BTW, no real news on the adoption, we hope we are close to being done but we just have to wait ...

A silver lining? It's been rainy the last few days in Boston. But today's drive home on Route 2 had a bonus -- the sun was shining down through a crack in the clouds, illuminating the super-green grass along the roadside and the multicolored trees in various stages of blooming/leafing out, against the dark sky. I wished I'd had my camera, although this kind of thing is hard to capture. Especially with a digital camera, which doesn't seem to capture sublteties of light very well. But at least I saw it.

Spring? I think it really is spring. I think. I hope ...

About not being here I haven't been here (as in this blog) very much recently. Sometimes I feel I'm not really "here" in general -- doesn't mean things are bad or anything, but just that life is a little too intense sometimes and I feel the need to take a mental break from it all. There's also the contradiction -- I feel close to some of the readers here, but this is still a public space and there's a lot of things I can't talk about here easily, or at all. Blogs are interesting -- some of them spell our pretty much everything (or seem to, anyway), while others always have something going on between the lines. Sometimes the latter is true here. It isn't just privacy, a lot of my thoughts wouldn't make sense to anyone else.

Oh, the things you will find (and lose again) We're in the middle of housecleaning, a combination of getting ready for guests and (we hope) getting ready for our son's arrival. I don't like to clean much, but there is the benefit of finding long-lost items. In the last few days, we've found a ton of things I'd lost, including: 1) manual to camcorder (a new one, somehow the manual got lost about a week after we got it) 2) remote control to stereo (lost many months ago). I'm not sure I should count this because I am not positive where it is right now, but I should be able to find it quickly 3) disposable camera with some pictures left to shoot 4) a number of books I wanted to start reading but forgot about We've gotten a lot better about throwing things out, but the volume of stuff in this house is still amazing. Very little of it of course is valuable (although I have lost things like the digital camera for a few days). Unfortunately, we somehow managed to misplace a whole bag of toys and childproofing stuff we just got. Oops. And today I completely forgot that I was signed up to take a training class. Just as well, because I don't have time for it, but I fear my department is going to get billed for it. Another non-brownie-point for yours truly. They say the rich are different from you and I. Maybe they don't spend cash on tons of random items that turn into clutter. There probably is more to it than that, but it would be a start ...

Must ... write ... document jen's post directed me to this which generated (from this here blog) this: BigCat Fairly boring commentary from an oversensitive, emotionally demanding computer nerd with the sleep study is it by more bars up in this section // document. write document.write document.write document. write ; document. I especially like the end; since my job is software development and, while I do get to write some code, a lot of time is spent on project documents ... (Thanks Jen, you gave me a fun link which I was able to turn into yet another mildly amusing post with absolutely no effort on my part -- a big win for all concerned, certainly, except for poor Rob whose server is slowly burning up from the load you generated ... Jen, how could you!)

The "Yikes!" List It's a list of things to do before we bring home our son. My wife calls it the "Yikes! list". It's long. I put safety bars up in his room today, so part of one item is checked off. A lot to go. But I am motivated.

Gotta get away? Well I don't have naked girlie pix up here or anything (sorry about that...), but if you are supposed to be working instead of browsing you can click the little green button on the top left. I saw this at Cheyenne's.

Think? This quiz says that I am a Naturalist Thinker. As usual, my wife (thanks to her for the link) was surprised by that. Sometimes I honestly don't know who I am either. And sometimes I get confused between what I want to be and what I really am.