And this is what a sleepless night does to a person. I will now have to explain to my entire extended family why I look like I taught 14 courses instead of 4 this semester. I publish this photo on purpose so that the family members who read the blog see it and know what to expect.

Insomnia always comes at the worst possible moment,  doesn’t it? I never feel sleepless when I can stay in bed all day long next day, catching up on sleep. I mean, why couldn’t it have attacked me at any other day in the past 3 weeks? Why can’t I be snoozing happily in a warm bed instead of sitting in the kitchen waiting for coffee to brew and knowing that I have to catch an international flight in a few hours?

I blame the middle-of-the-night phone call but it isn’t really the call’s fault. I wouldn’t have slept anyway.

So to avoid letting the night go to waste completely, I decided to finish East Lynne, a XIXth-century novel from my Classics Club challenge. I will post a review when I’m done but for now I can say that I absolutely love love love this wonderful novel.

Oh, and one more thing. I got so tired packing and wrapping gifts (an autistic packing gifts is a very sorry sight, folks) that instead of a full, sealed bottle of Dominican rum I almost wrapped an opened, slightly depleted bottle. That would be the shame of the century. Can you imagine a worse gift than a bottle of alcohol that has been partaken of already? Somehow this seems like a particularly horrible gift to give. It is like saying, “We tried it and it wasn’t too good but we know that you are so desperate to get shit-faced that you’d lap up any old leftover moonshine, so here, have a happy drunken New Year!”

It is telling me that in the past hour the blog has had 9 unique visitors who are in 12 different countries. Those blog readers sure travel fast.

As a respectable married lady (a.k.a. boring old frump), I never get any calls in the middle of the night. This is why it never occurs to me to turn off the phone’s sound at night.

And, of course, I just had to get a phone call at 1 am precisely on the night when I have to get up at 4 am for an early flight. Guess who will not be getting any sleep tonight. 

Here is all the proof you might have ever needed that the Russian Duma made the best decision ever when it adopted legislation prohibiting international adoptions of orphans:

I’ve always felt there was nothing worse than a parent having to bury their child. I don’t think that anymore. What I’m about to write might sound morbid. If you read to the end, you might understand why it’s not.

Frankly, I’d rather bury my child than leave her in “the home for invalids” where she currently resides.

This is an excerpt from a blog post titled “Death Would Be Better” of a very scary woman who will now be prevented (and thank God in heaven for that) from adopting a small girl from Russia. Her self-proclaimed position is that if little Polina can’t be her toy, then she should just die. This long and rambling post is filled with the most egregious idiocies you can imagine. But what really terrifies me is how many times the scary woman repeats the words “death would be better” when talking about the little girl. This religious fanatic thinks it is up to her to decide when people should die.

You have to agree that it is very disturbing when folks like these travel around the world shopping for kids whom they can’t even see as human. Imagine if the child doesn’t live up to the sicko’s expectations. She already thinks the girl should die if she can’t own her.

I feel too traumatized right now. My regular readers know how I feel about child abuse and can imagine how I react when I see people proclaim that a child should die.

A disgusting vicious animal who dared take my name in vain and quote my blog on a forum for idiot losers like himself wrote the following piece of idiocy:

From rather basic logic, children are not as much people as are most adults simply due to the fact that adults have more complex cognition, introspection, and preferences. Why would any rational person think it right to involuntarily sacrifice the well being of an innocent adult for the sake of a child, especially when alternative methods exist?

I understand that this freakazoid was abused in childhood. However, this is not an excuse for being a piece of shit in perpetuity.

Stupid insect, since you read my blog I need to inform you of the following: you are worse than a cockroach. You don’t have “more complex cognition.” You have no cognition at all because you are congenitally brain-dead. Stop blabbing stupidly about rational persons. Not only are you not rational, you are not even a person. The reason why you are so lonely and pathetic is because every normal human being finds you disgusting and can’t stand your stench.

Your writing is also ridiculously bad.

Remember, people, no matter what kind of damage your irresponsible parents inflicted on you in childhood, the moment you hit adulthood, you become responsible for solving your own issues and not inflicting your psychological garbage on everybody else. Also, I don’t care what kind of stuff you publish elsewhere but the moment you take my name in vain you will know my wrath.

This:

And this:

And this:

is where I’m traveling tomorrow. Weather Canada is predicting up to 40 cms (16 inches) of snow accumulating today. I can’t believe I will finally see snow. I think I will cry. N. will cry, too, but not for joy. He has a very low tolerance for the cold which is very weird for a Russian person.

I wonder how somebody so irredeemably stupid got on my blogroll:

President of the Russian Federation Vladimir V. Putin was, along with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, one of the great leaders of the 20^th Century. Khrushchev exhibited enormous physical and moral courage in initiating his country’s long, slow, very painful recovery from Stalinism. Putin took control of Russia when President Boris N. Yeltsin’s policies had brought it to the brink of an abyss such as America has not looked into since the aftermath of our Civil War. He has managed to more-or-less end a simmering war in Chechnya and stabilize his country.

Putin became President of Russia in year 2000, yet the author of this garbage article somehow transforms him into a XXth century leader. The physical courage of Khrushchev and the comparison of the American Civil war to Yeltsin’s reforms are also very bizarre.

The rest of the article is as bad as its beginning. I wonder how far into one’s ass one has to reach to bring something so idiotic out of it.

I know I will have to wait until late on December 31 to find out if we will get to 1,000,000 hits on this blog’s platform. We are at 996,313 hits right now, and nothing can be predicted because end-of-the-year blog-reading is notoriously spotty.

The suspense is ki-iii-iii-iii-lling meeeeee. . .

Reader Paranoid knows me so well that it’s making me paranoid. This is either somebody who is really brilliant at textual analysis or somebody who is clairvoyant.