Coming up: Englettlaw gets a (W)right-new associate. Which Adella will be the evil twin and which will spend her next season in a coma before waking up with amnesia!?! Doormageddon hits Adella where it hurts the most and when she least expects. Stunned and stymied by this basic betrayal, she plots her revenge and feeds on the proceeds of her new female Female Englettlaw Fight Club venture. Will anyone ever make it past all the releases required and on to the club itself?? Will they make it past the releases just to do with potential paper poisoning from signing the rest of the releases?? And rain heralds a twist and a turn to Andrew's training calendar. The DINKIverse goes topsy turvy and track turns to training-not-otherwise-specified. Does Adella have the proper footwear to survive??
So, yes, I am far beyond the honeymoon phase and smack dab into the middling happy matrimonial phase of my connubial bliss-fest. Passage and time notwithstanding, there are still some loose ends yet to be tied off in a happy little granny knot. Name-changing, as I may have alluded to in the past, is a bit more of a hackneyed PITA pit than I might have previously fathomed. So much for my plans to suffer a midlife crisis and change my name to Empress Xeno of the Potato People in about ten years...
While I have managed over the course of these fiveish months to reflect my newly acquired matronly cognomen on several relevant documents, certain areas are a tad more ambiguous. You know, I'm a pretty protean person, often quite difficult to describe. Why shouldn't my name be similarly ambiguous?
Those aforementioned areas revolve around that pesky legal "practice" (which has yet to make anything approximating perfect, I might add) for the most part. I mean I've got my priorities here. Google Plus? Changed the day of. Facebook shortly afterwards. Social Security, ok... license, passport... most of my bank accounts... almost all of my healthcare providers and new insurance policies... but what my legal license to practice law and arguably essential component of my current livelihood? Meh! Yeah, I still am officially Adella Thompson according to the WSBA (the WA State Bar, not the Biking people, just so Andrew doesn't get confused). Which is silly, because the form is actually quite simple. I'm just that lazy or distracted or something. Mail is very challenging. You have to seal the envelop. You have to put stamps on things. Then you have to redo all that because you realize you forgot to put anything in the envelop! Don't get me started about how easy it is to confuse trash bins and postal boxes.
At the moment I'm straddling names. Advertising myself as Adella Wright, because it tickles me to do so, but still signing as Adella Thompson (well technically, signing as BIG SCRIBBLE, since my signature defies mere lettering, but the printed name underneath is usually Thompson). My voicemail at the office says "Thompson" (but my lips say Wright!). And until recently, I've made do with business cards that have my old name and a very old picture that every person who has seen them insists looks nothing like me. I tend to agree.
I think we could milk this and make it appear that there are two associates named Adella at the office! But in the meantime, I finally decided to just make myself some quick-off vistaprint business cards with my new name, a recent photo, and maybe a more prominent mention of my mediation work. I rather like them. They aren't quite as high class as the old ones, but they are very me(because I am a brighter shade of green than Peter Sagan's beard, of course).
No really, it was a door!
Ok, is it an odd coincidence that this morning I have a nasty bruise and cut from having "walked into a door" and that the exact same thing happened to our paralegal/office manager Leslie a few months ago? What on earth is happening at Englettlaw, you might ask! And I don't blame you. Ok, ok, before anyone starts pressing charges against boss-lady +Pamela Englett, I'll admit it: we're a front for an all female Fight Club (empowerment through brutality is our mission goal). It would explain my dappled legs and their marbled lodes of contussive glory. If you wanna see a legal mountain, try showing up to a Fight Club event in the middle of the night at a law office. If this is your first night at Fight Club... you won't have time to fight, because you'll have carpal tunnel by the time you sign all the relevant documents and releases!
But shhhh shhh, that's all subject to our usual run of confidentiality caveats. Here's the "official" story. Last night, it was windy. It was, incidentally, also dark. I'm not sure I'd call it stormy, but for dramatic purposes we can go there. Certainly we had our splatterings of rain earlier. Anyways, the wind is a player in this tale. It gushed in through all apertures and played ping-pong with any open doors through the evening. As I was stumbling out of bed to use the bathroom circa 3:00 a.m., I happened to be a touch startled by the slam of a far off study-door. I was subsequently far more startled when my own bedroom door - the turncoat - launched a stealth attack at my face. The noise went something like BAM... yes I stepped back and shook my head like they do in cartoons before registering what had happened.
Cursing the fact that this may well interfere with the rest of my evening's sleep, I meandered to the upstairs bathroom, one hand attached to my surging goose egg. A few minutes later, I noticed I was also bleeding, so I once again rolled my eyes at this inconvenience and went searching for bandaids and tylenol downstairs. Happy and shocked to say that no further hijinks ensued. I downed my minor handful of expired painkillers, toweled off my forehead, applied a rather large bandaid and made it back to the bed with only a little bit of panic at each looming door frame.
So your physics lessons for the day: wind moves things, if you hit the edge of a door, it won't really make the door move, perhaps most people walk head-first into accompanying spaces, and a smack to the face may be a more powerful stimulant than your average alarm clock.
Yeah but you should see the door!
Ok, actually the door emerged from our epic nocturnal battle entirely unscathed... so far... but I'm just biding my time. It expects retaliation now, and is ever vigilant. But it will drop that guard. It will, and ooooh boy does it have a can of whoop ass waiting for it and that expiration date is just a suggestion baby! In the meantime, I've graduated from jaunty bandage to open air teeny tiny little injury. It looked a bit more impressive with the bandaid, but I like to think that the red sets off my eyes and a little asymmetry is a beautiful thing.
Just to perpetuate my emerging myth of toughness, I will be making growly constipated gym junkie faces and screaming URRRRRGH at random intervals throughout the day. I like to think that I've put in my research time at the gym long enough to put some of this into practice. I shall have my beer with a pound of whey, thank you, and then will smother myself in bacon oil and kiss my pecs. My lips might not quite reach yet, but I'm in training. They'll get there. Yes, I recognize that were this to ever make it to youtube this would be the most likely thing I have ever produced to go viral.
In truth, I'm not feeling so tough as much as I'm a little worn-thin at the moment. May be that I have earned my own little illness after a stressful and child-laden (those germ infested harbingers of doom to non-parents in particular) few weeks. It may also be the changing season.
Not that I do not adore fall, because let me clearly aver that I am enthralled with this new transition to autumnal odors and sights. I am welcoming the rain and all the freshness it brings. I spent a half hour simply staring at the sky over the water a few days ago, watching the clouds and leaves dance about in full thrall of a good gust and bluster.
I am excitedly ensorcelled with memories of warm chai tea, fires (in appropriate places that include neither my stove nor my toaster), turning leaves, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg warming a crisp and cool air. Oh yes, I love fall, but it does tend to make me sleepy when it first arrives.
And perhaps I am anticipating another mad week of rushing, as yet another trial looms in the mist offset by several little frittering emergencies skimpering at all peripheries.
Whatever it may be, it is a good day to move slowly, sip deeply, and make a very silly face while posting yet another selfie with my actual face in it (two days in a row? I may have to knock fifteen years off myself and go back to whatever the hell is popular with the kids online these days).
Have a lovely day and may all your socks by comfy and comely!
Return of the Pacific Northweather! And Other Autumnal Excitements -
The first day in quite some time to require the good services of my trusty rain boots is upon us. These babies were a compromise purchase after a long-standing disagreement over how fun standing around in cold damp weather while Andrew races and/or more likely spends a few good hours wandering after my sweetie in full post-race daze and haze is or is not. If I recall, my suggestion was that I didn't always enjoy travelling long distances and then spending entire days mostly sitting in a car (usually hungry, tired, and underfed) while he spent the first part of the morning warming up, the next part racing, and the next hour or two not entirely able to remember who I was or that I was with him as he flitted from post-race recap and cycle conversation to post-race recap and cycle conversation, only to get home very tired and (at the time) several hours in the hole on homework that I just couldn't focus on during the event itself. His counter was perhaps I'd enjoy myself more if I had warmer clothes...
I jest, I jest. He did suggest that, but he also mentioned some other relevant points of his own, like not liking to feel rushed after a race, not wanting to drive home too quickly after leaving it all on the field, and suggesting we kill a few birds and have me drive home if this came up in the future. But the better shoes was definitely his first line of attack. We almost went down the rabbit hole of a day's worth of discussion on the merits of various hiking boots, before I brought it back.
Anyways, while a bit of a red herring in a discussion that has otherwise resolved itself (I think this race-day dynamic was more of an issue when we lived in different cities and I was a little shyer about giving a blanket "yeah, I don't feel like road tripping to Eastern Washington this weekend for a two hour bike race, but have fun!"), it was a decent general point: rain boots are a good thing to have in the Pacific Northwest for somebody who walks as much as I do. Granted, recently I walk more indoors at my desk than outdoors, but in previous incarnations, I've done a lot of pedestrian-commuting in sneakers inadequate to the task. And today I will be outside in the puddles for long enough to thoroughly soak my sockies in improper footwear.
I've always had boots, of course, but these usually also have 3-4 inch heels on them. Nice to have a pair that are mostly usable for mid-range foot trafficking (yes, I have an internation fence that specializes in the left feet of ballerinas who have danced themselves to death on the stage - bit of a niche indeed, but they're known to be quite lucky in parts of Southeastern Asia). These have proven far handier for jaunts to and from work, and I'll admit they have been particularly handy for actual muck and mire of your average race course (as the mud splatters can attest). Trying to walk through the bog of a mountain bike race area (read middle of nowhere trailhead) in four inch heels might be a bit of a good prescription for serious injury.
And today is the first day in a long while for full functionality. It's raining! As well it should be. It is, after all, almost Labor Day weekend. What better time to bring back our regularly scheduled weather. There are still some creaks and cricks to the changing meteorology - it is still getting awfully warm and muggy in the afternoon, for instance - but we're plunging ever onward towards cold, mossy and damp! Must be cyclocross season!!
And yes, yes, it is almost 'cross season. That's a kind of bike racing, for the uninitiated. +Andrew Wright has just officially remixed his fastidiously kept training calendar to shift gears (har har) away from track. Not actually towards 'cross necessarily, but away from track anyways. Given the recent trends in weather and the need to cancel race nights when it rains, this might be a clever idea. This month it's mountain bikes, baby. And "fun". Very scheduled, very tabulated and tracked, and very painful "fun". And, you know, a 125 mile ride just for kicks followed by a mountain bike duathlon just for premium respiratory distress and full on mud saturation. "Fun!"
Hi calendar is aglow with new and different work-outs on slightly different days. Talk of how good it would be to increase running workouts and strength training have suddenly been replaced with a complete deletion of strength and abridgment of running. This will be tinkered with no doubt. It is a work in progress. Artistry takes time and patience. And this will be the main topic of conversation between for the next several months...
As it goes, wherever it goes, I've got the boots this time, so I'm ready for it... maybe kinda!
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