I was in Nashville for four days this week, and came back Thursday night. I left home not wanting to leave, found myself not wanting to come back, and now wishing I never had to leave again.

One of the hardest parts of travel for work is that there is pressure from both within and without to be a tourist. I had my best time in any city about ten years ago in Nashville. I was there with a colleague, we stayed downtown, and spent every night out listening to some kind of music, from a small smoky jazz club to glitsy flashy large and loud country music to the very serious, no-talking singer/songwriter venue. I have such vivid memories of that two-week period during which 17–year cicadas were emerging from their sleeping places. . At first I thought I was hearing lawn sprinklers, the singing noise that grew louder every day until they mated and started falling out of the sky as they died. I remember the lushness of the greenery in the mountains where we went on a weekend when someone rented a car. And I remember the fun local people we worked with, the really nice atmosphere I enjoyed every day.

The work I am doing now is training visually impaired employees of the federal government on the assistive technology they need to do their jobs. Ten years ago the IRS switched from DOS to Windows and all their blind employees got about two weeks of one-on-one training to learn the new system. I was one of about a couple of dozen trainers who went around the country for six months doing that training.

It is harder being out there alone. I get called in when a new visually impaired employee starts work, when someone gets a new piece of equipment they need training on, or occasionally when an existing employee loses vision and needs to re-learn the job they already do. Most nights I go back to my hotel, take off my shoes, check my email and try to get up the energy to go out to dinner. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I just take a walk. Sometimes I do a tourist thing or go find some good local music. But it’s life, it’s in the middle of the rest of my life, and sometimes, like this past week, I just go back to the hotel, order room service or delivery, plug in my computer and take care of annoying work. I am still working on my 2007 expenses and tax return.

One night in Nashville I got a call from a concerned friend back home who went by my house and reported the young people were smoking. I’m allergic to the smoke and in recent years that has resulted in related asthma attacks. There have been several occasions when I came home and had to leave and take out a hotel room that night because the air in my apartment has been too permeated by the smoke. They know not to do it. The newest one has never been around when I vacated or went to the emergency room, but she has her own asthma problems and knows what it’s like. I never get told it actually happened, I always get some line about smoke coming in the windows or something. So I still don’t know as they are adamant nobody was smoking and he was clear something strong and smoky was going on. But I was upset enough ahead of time that they did a decent job of airing it out. Or something.

But at that point I was about to overnight mail my notice to the landlord which I then didn’t do. I was not about to go look for a nicer apartment if they couldn’t respect my need to breathe in the one we had. After I got home I offered them the option – I could walk the notice to the landlord’s office in person or we could wait another month and they somberly agreed they wanted to wait. I don’t even know why. I didn’t ask. I went to bed and crashed.

That is the other hard part of the travel. How to integrate picking up life when I get back. Unlike the last time, I can throw things into my suitcase now in half an hour or less. ten years ago I would be up all night packing, no matter how long or short a period of time I’d be away for. But I still crash when I get home, regardless of whether I had work that day and got home really late or whether it was just a leisurely travel day. And then the next day I want to be on vacation, not running around doing daily life work.

This time it was taken care of for me. The worker from the foster agency was coming to certify my home Friday at noon for Daughter#2, as I’ll call her, while I figure out names and anonymity. Fortunately they all took it seriously and the house was basically clean and neat when I got back. Nice to come home to that!

Since I hadn’t planned on Daughter#2, she is in the living room. It is off a hallway and you have to go through it to get to #1daughter’s room, but not to get to my room, the kitchen, or the bathroom. And it has windows. So it basically fulfills all the criteria the system has for rooms that are acceptable for foster kids. It doesn’t have an actual door in the doorway, but the whole of the room that she is using is out of line of sight of the doorway. And she is sleeping on a sofa-bed but sleeps on it as a sofa, not pulled out. The door and the bed were, I had thought, the two problems we might have to fix. She said she’d prefer not to get a bed until we moved and found out how much space there was. But I’d told the foster care people I’d be happy to buy a bed. I also told them I’d be happy to put up whatever kind of door they deemed acceptable. I hadn’t expected the guy walking through to tell me we didn’t have enough room. I told him we were planning to move, and his comment was, “you need a living room:.

Well, living rooms are nice. But we live in Manhattan. Middle class people in Manhattan are often raising kids in studio and one bedroom apartments with room dividers. Many people do not have living rooms. Despite what I said before about needing that new apartment, we *want* that new apartment, but many people make this sort of space work out of necessity. We have a small but nice Eat in Kitchen where we can spend time together without being in anyone’s bedroom. And all of New York City outside our front door.

So, I’m nervous. If it is all approved, we get a stipend check out of the system for Daughter#2 which will help us fund that new apartment. Since New York is one of the few states that allow kids to stay in the system till they turn 21, we will have that check for a while. I prefer to do legal adoption and she prefers to wait and age out of the system, but if we do legal adoption the check converts to an adoption subsidy till she turns 21. And we theoretically should have been getting it since the day she moved in September, but, even though she is here and the agency is getting money for her, and I’m already a certified foster parent for them and the apartment is certified for more than one kid, they don’t seem to plan to give it to us until the apartment is certified for her, specifically. Now I find out that my own medical exam that I was OK waiting on till December, now has to also be done before that certification. Which they couldn’t have told me sooner either. Theoretically, since Daughter#1 also opted to defer legal adoption until she aged out, we could lose her check if they don’t certify the apartment, livingroomless as we are.

I could be worrying for nothing. And personally I’d rather ditch the system and ditch the checks than be tied to this. We could get a new larger apartment and rent a room or two to a student or two. And I’m making enough for us to get by if not live in style. But since the girls want what they can get out of the system that served them so poorly their whole lives, well, I’m in it but not very happily.

What I am most afraid of is the never-ending running in circles without answers and without anyone at the agency doing their job properly that happened when Daughter#1 first came to me. My attitude had changed in recent times and I basically decided to ignore the agency altogether, except for doing the things they specifically require to certify the apartment. I don’t ask anything from them and don’t offer anything. And live my life the way I need to without worrying if it fits in with their regs or not. But I don’t want to put Daughter#2 in the position of having to make a decision to stay here if I’m not certified or leave to maintain her own status in the system.