Just before Thanksgiving, I sat in a rocking chair, holding an infant in my arms and listening to her breathing as she slept the peaceful sleep of a newborn. There was not a soul in our friends' house, save for our two souls, and outside a light rain pitter-pattered on the deck.

It wasn't our child but our friends', a spectacular gift thrust upon them like lightning-an adoption. We're staying with our friends while our home is rebuilt, and one has to wonder about their sanity: Not only have they put up with the four of us and a hyperactive dog, but they've also been navigating the adoption process for the past several months. Picture-taking, biography-writing, letter-stuffing parties and mailings. All an abstract part of the long process of adoption, which they settled on after several miscarriages.

But once the letters go out, there's no way of knowing when the call will come. We'd all planned to have a big Friday night dinner at the homestead after Pat got back from a business trip. But he called from the road: He was racing up to Sacramento to meet Jennifer because there was a baby waiting for them. One minute you're a weary business commuter; the next, a parent. It's an amazing story, too long for this space.

A couple of days later, I received an e-mail from David Knuth, the engineer who penned "Diary of an Unemployed Engineer" earlier this year. He's gotten a job with the company that originally laid him off. If you yet haven't read his series, you can find it at www.eet.com/op/diary. It's a blueprint for getting through one of the most disheartening, demoralizing things that can happen to a working human. Knuth managed it with guts, brains and faith, and now he's back plying his craft.

A lot of bad things happen every day. Disease. Wars. Car accidents. Murders. Miscarriages. Layoffs on a Biblical scale.

But good things do happen to good people, I reaffirmed, with little Sawyer sighing in my arms, a hint of what I'd like to think was a smile on her new lips.

Another piece of good news, although it pales beside Sawyer's arrival: We have resurrected the "Immortal Works"

caption contest (see opposite page). Kudos to David Barber, a longtime IW contributor, who is offering some of his digital photos as fodder for your captions.

Bring 'em on. And bring on the holidays.

http://www.eet.com