This blog has moved to a more private place.
If you want to keep reading, please leave a comment here with your email address (must have that), and I will send you the information about where to find me. Please tell me who you are, and if you blog publicly, your URL.
I will not publish comments, so your information will be safe. :-)
Thanks for reading!!
PLEASE note: If you do not leave an email address (or email it to me) I cannot make you an authorized reader!
**ALSO, I'm happy to invite lurkers - please de-lurk and let me know who you are (and where you blog, if you do)**
I’m going to make this blog private for some period – at least until I get through court and my adoption of the Sprout is final and binding in Ethiopia.
So, if you would like to keep reading (and I hope you do!) I need you to send me your email address. I will use your email address to officially “invite” you to be an authorized reader. After you sign in once, you can read my blog just the same way you do know. And feed readers (like Bloglines) will still work… or so I’ve been told!!
So, please leave me a comment and give me your email address, or email your email address to me at yo porter at gmail dot com. (If you want me to delete your comment after I get your email address from it, I'll be happy to do that.)
I’ll make the switch in a week or so.
Thanks, and sorry for any inconvenience this causes any of you, my beloved readers!!!
(note: some comments have been removed at the request of the commenters)
So, most of you have heard the recent uproar about a family who was in the process of adopting from Ethiopia, and had their adoption terminated by the Ethiopian government because of their blog.
They had posted photos of their referred child (which is against Ethiopian law, as I now know) and were doing extensive fundraising, including lots of negative description of the conditions of orphans in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government took the position that if they had to do all this fundraising, they obviously could not afford the adoption. Very sad for the family, who did not know that their blog could possibly cost them their adoption.
{begin rant - feel free to skip} Frankly, I can kind of see the Ethiopians' point on this. I am not a big fan of public fundraising for an adoption - call me cranky, but I say if you can't afford it or finance it yourself (or with your family), you might want to wait until you can. Please note I'm just talking about PUBLIC fundraising. (Full disclosure: my mom has helped me financially with the travel expenses of my adoption - and I cannot begin to tell you how much that helps. It is HUGE. She gave me this as a gift, though, and I wouldn't have asked her for it. Gifts are great!) I've never heard of anyone doing a public fundraiser for a biological child. And I think SOME the big public fundraising efforts feed into the whole "rescue" thing which I find so distasteful. Yes, the child needs a home, but when the adopting family treats the adoption as a rescue mission, it negates all the losses that the child experiences, and sets up a weird dynamic - intentional or not - that the adopted child should now be grateful to his/her parents. I don't think any child deserves that. {end rant, stepping away from the soapbox}
ANYWAY, here's the thing - I'm now kind of nervous about this blog. Even though I've taken great care to keep it anonymous, I'm worried about the Ethiopian position on blogs, and I'm worried that I'm exposing myself (and the Sprout) here.
Should I password protect my blog? Make it invitation only?
Oh great blogger society, tell me what to do. (that is if you don't already hate me for my position about adoption fundraising)
Thanks to the fabulous Kate over at From Russia With Love, I'm now playing the Pay It Forward game.
How does it work?
Here are the rules:
I will send a handmade gift (of my choosing) to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this "PIF" exchange, and who make the same pledge on their own blog.
I don’t know what that gift will be yet and you may not receive it tomorrow or next week, but you will receive it within 365 days, that is my promise!
The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward - on your own blog.
Best wishes to all of you my beloved readers, for a happy, healthy, and prosperous year in 2008.
And if you are venturing out this evening, be safe!
(look, the mommy worry gene is already kicking in!)
Me, I'm staying very much IN tonight with a warm dog and a stack of Netflix DVDs. Woo hoo! (Gosh I'm boring...)
Much love,
chou-chou
Well I thought I'd have easier access to the Internets at my nephews' house than I did, so sorry not to post this yesterday!!
Merry Christmas to all my friends in the blogopshere who celebrate Christmas. Happy (late) Chanukah to those who celebrate that holiday. And happy solstice, Kwanzaa, Festivus and other holidays to everyone.
I hope you had a wonderful holiday. Mine was nice, despite the lack of referral. :-)
Be back soon.
Melissa Fay Greene, author of "There is No Me Without You" (perhaps THE book for Ethiopian adopters to read), has a website and a blog.and i am feeling under the weather... no energy to come up with a good post. So this is what you get, which is admittedly quite lame and only here to keep me from failing at NaBloPoMo.
Whatev.
On November 1st, I changed my background color to purple in support of Elle's excellent initiative to raise awareness of National Adoption Awareness Month.
However, I tried 4 different shades of purple, and they all look goddawful with my template. The only one that did not make me want to puke was so dark that it didn't even look purple.
So, being the shallow person that I am, after 5 days of being eggplant, then violet, then dark purple, then plum, I'm changing back to my delicious dark chocolate brown. (sorry, Elle)
But I'm adding the "Go Purple" badge to my sidebar and will keep it there the whole month.
It's day TWO and I’m already cranky about NaBloPoMo. I’m wanting to write a letter to the editor explaining myself. Instead I will just say this: internet connectivity failure = complete excuse for not posting.
I live in a charming little neighborborhood. Which I like a lot. And the people? Super nice.
However, the infrastructure is, well, OLD. And sometimes doesn’t work – power outages are annoyingly common, and I always know they happened, even if I wasn’t home, because I have to redo ALL the settings on my irrigation system, reset the timer on my front light, reset the oven clock, reset the microwave clock, reset the Bose CD player/clock radio, and about 9 million other stupid devices.
Yeeesh. And now, to add to the annoyance, when the power goes out (and therefore my router and cable modem are No Workez Pas for some period of time even after the power comes back on), I cannot fulfill my broadly announced commitment to post every damn day. Especially when I am already in my pajamas and NOT going to be driving around with laptop looking for somebody's unsecured WiFi to heist.
OK, so there it is. I am back-dating this post to last night, when I TRIED to get online to post but could not, and hereby declaring that I am STILL IN the NaBloPoMo running.
Haruphm.
The fabulous Elle has come up with a way to draw attention to the fact that November is National Adoption Awareness month.
She is "going purple" - changing her blog colors, and encouraging others to do the same.
Sounds like a good idea to me, so I've temporarily gone purple too!!
Click on over to her site to get a purple button for your own blog.
OK, all you bloggers out there - how about a little challenge?
November is National Blog Posting Month (yes, that's NaBloPoMo).
Head on over to NaBloPoMo central and sign up, and see if you can post EVERY day in November. I've signed up.
Who's with me?
Thanks to the Dalai Mama for posting about it first...
Check me out!
My superstar friend and all-around spectacular person Clare made me this header. It helps that in real life, she's a fine artist and professional label designer, so she knows what the hell she's doing.
Do you love it?
I luuuuuuuuuuuuurve it.
Tasha, you are right (and very observant) that I did change it again, from black background to a scrumptious dark chocolately color.
Elle, you are ALSO right that I quite desperately need a need header. My mom painted me an awesome watercolor of a sprout, (see?) but I have no idea how to make that part of a header. Know anyone with mad skilz who can do this? :-)
Thanks to Kate, I've discovered that I'm Mint Green. Don't love that shade, but I do like the description.
| You Are Mint Green |
 Balanced and calm, you have mastered the philosophy of living well. Your friends seek you out for support, and you are able to bring stability to chaotic situations. You're very open and cheerful - and you feel like you have a lot of freedom in life. Your future may hold any number of exciting things, and you're ready for all of them! |
OK, I took the Book Quiz (thanks Michele). Am slightly befuddled by the analysis, because I do feel very clear in what I believe, but here goes:
I am (apparently) Siddhartha!
(Which is particularly interesting because lately I've been getting really into Ayurvedic stuff, and was going to post about a treatment I got recently that was really incredible and calming and had a lasting effect which is amazing... so maybe I had that on the brain? hmmmm.)
You're Siddhartha!
by Hermann Hesse
You simply don't know what to believe, but you're willing to try anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you've spent some time in every camp. But you still don't have any idea what camp you belong in. This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It's time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in ferries.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
Thank you Pamplemousse for the inspiration!
this was fun... a mini version of me (and my dog, India).
Go to Wee World to make your own Wee Me...
I suck at memes. The lovely and talented Haze tagged me AGES ago with meme, and I have just been lame lame lame.
But, here - finally - are seven random bits about me that you might not know:
