arctic slushy

Incredibly happy family news aside, I logged in two or four times today to check up on the status of the Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012. (sadly, Gaagii (Navajo for Raven) has not stuck)

It wasn't until just now that I saw a post by pickledginger, reporting that, "for the United States, last month apparently was the hottest month on record. Not the hottest July -- the hottest month."

Here is a beautiful, high definition pic of the storm.

One commenter over at Andrew Revkin's NYT opinion piece sums up my concerns:"Low pressure over the North Pole in summer and high pressure in the winter is the opposite of the way it always was during recorded history, until recently. Reversed pressure at the pole shifts the Rossby wave, causing the jet stream to shift and giving us very "unusual" weather. The weather keeps on getting weirder.

The global climate models are telling us that more global warming will make farming more difficult. Goodbye food. An interesting storm indeed."

I look around at this summer, the drought and the heat, the storms, the floods, -- and I wonder, how will we do when it's worse, and worse and worse? How long can things hold together?

FML

If you looked at me, you probably wouldn't think I was angry. Even talking to me -- I might seem a little excited, but not angry. As a kid, we weren't allowed to be angry and so I don't do angry very well.

I got a call from the boy's social worker today saying that something had come up on me when they pulled my DHS record. They can't place the boys here unless and until it is expunged.

I've had several contacts with the Marquette County CPS. I told the social worker this and she replied that as long as I was never formally charged, then it would be ok. Since I have never been formally charged, I figured that it would all go smoothly.

But not so. This is the situation:

Back in 1995, I was trying to open an Adult Foster Care home. Mike and I had bought (on land contract) a piece of property out in the township with two brick homes on it. But when we applied for an AFC license, we were denied because our credit rating was sucky.

So, having all of this room, I started taking in folks; some could pay but most of them couldn't, and I ran a small Adult Day Care for a while, taking in clients from the Veteran's Hospital. And I worked at Taco Bell in the evening. Mike drove truck hauling wood chips down to the Wisconsin paper mills, but the company he worked for didn't pay much We lost the place in'97. The mortgage payments were just too much, and I didn't have enough clients – and too many free loaders.

When I look back on it, I think that it was a good thing that it closed. I didn't know enough about myself and other people to run something like that. I hated asking people for money, and I let people live there who couldn't pay me. No one wanted to do any work, and I wasn't good about making them pull their weight. So I just worked as hard as I could, holding it all together. I was always running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I guess you'd have to say that it was a learning experience.

One of the clients out there was a young man on SSI who happened to be gay. That first year, I had to throw a woman out. She was disruptive -- lied to everyone and started fights. After I threw her out, she called CPS on us, saying that both my clients and the kids were neglected and abused.

So CPS investigated and at first, they had no problems. Then they found out that I had a gay man on the premises who sometimes looked after the kids while I was at work in the evenings.

Jordan is a great guy, and I trusted him. I was aware that he had been sexually abused as a very young child. We talked long and hard about it. I talked to the kids. I talked to the rest of the folks who were living out there. The kids said that Jordan had never done anything that made them uncomfortable or afraid, the other folks said they had never seen or heard anything that might make them suspicious, and Jordan said that he'd kill himself before he would hurt a kid.

The CPS worker, though, had a problem with Jordan. He was a practicing gay man, he had a record of mental illness (gender identity disorder!) and he had been sexually abused as a child. But in the end, I said that there was nothing wrong with Jordan, I refused to kick Jordan out and the case was closed.

But the investigation is on my record, and until I get it cleared up, the kids can't live here. I'll be sending out a formal request today, by snail mail. It goes to a guy who is on vacation until Aug 13th, and then he has to formally hand it to his boss. Because that's the way it works.