I can’t wait! I’ve been going through football withdrawal since the Super Bowl. Of course, the big question is: Can I get my wife to make her world-famous chili for the game tonight?

It should be a tough matchup this year against Miami now that Culpepper is behind the wheel down there, but I think even with Batch driving our offense, we have a good enough defense to keep them off the board. I give the Steelers 5.5 points going into this game for the win.

The only bad thing is that I have Hines Ward on my big fantasy team this year and with his hamstring and Rothlesberger out, I’m not sure he’ll have a big game until week 3 or 4. I went for running backs this year and skimped a little on wide receivers. I hope it doesn’t come back to bite me. I also didn’t throw away any picks this year on unproven rookies who “have a ton of talent”. That has burned me the last 3 years in our league. I went for proven, reliable starters who will produce points for me every week.

I’ve missed the playoffs by 1 game every year in this league (this is my 5th year) so I changed my strategy and hopefully it’ll pay off for me.

GO STEELERS!

Our Guatemalan adoption has stalled out lately. We’re now on day 43 of Referral Wait. The thing is, our agency – named For This Child – has this absurd policy that childless couples who have the audacity to request a specific gender for their first child get to stay on the bottom of the list. That’s right; we stay there.

This means that even though we’ve been waiting 43 days, and someone submits all of their adoption paperwork tomorrow and does NOT specify a gender preference, they immediately move ahead of us in line. Then if a girl becomes available, they will get that referral before us. Likewise, if there is a new a couple who already has a boy, but wants a girl, they also jump ahead of us in the referral list.

As I said, absurd. Apparently this policy is driven entirely by the whims of the agency’s director and not by any actual accepted formula for referral waiting lists. All other agencies we’ve talked too laughed until tears when they heard this, saying it was insane. Of course, For This Child keeps this pecking order a secret until you’ve signed a contract and handed over $6,000. If I had known about this, I would have never signed with them.

Now we just wait and hope enough girls get put up for adoption in Guatemala that we eventually make it to the top of this list. This could be in two weeks, or it could be in two months – we have no idea. Too many variables in play for anyone to make an accurate guess as to when we’d be at the top.

If any of you out there are planning to do an adoption, make sure you join an agency with a first-come, first-serve policy instead of one driven by some nebulous set of values.

I recently completed the first stage of a real estate web site called mxFSBO.com. I used my new cfObjects libraries that I’ve been working on for about a year – on and off. Everything’s been working fine so far. The ajaxCFC integration worked flawlessly and even got a chance to implement my multiple inheritance code.

I plan on releasing the libraries within the next few months for people to play around with and provide any feedback.

The web site is a real estate application for all the “For Sale By Owner” people out there. FSBO resources are slim – as the real estate agent community undoubtedly lobbies against all efforts to provide them – and my client wanted to help the FSBO people in our area by offering them a place to post and browse properties. I hope it helps.