Coming up: Dust bunny revolt is put down, but at what cost? The mad cleaning despot leaves devastation in her wake. Will Ms. Englett's aquatic buddies survive the long trek across the desk to be reunited at the groundswell of a final orchestral coda? Prince Florimund hallucinates in a forest, kills a lady. and comes within the full orbit of the (W)right's fantastic child-surrogate fantasy. He demands bonbons! Will he terrorize the land and pee in attorneys' briefcases before his ravenous raging is satisfied? Or will he be far more cruel and take an angry nap? The practice of law gets tasty, chocolatey good. And the Olympics carry on in the background. Will Adella ever quite manage to follow what the announcers are yelling?
Gird up your support hose and helmets, gentle readers, and heed the starter pistol!
Moony Monday Nipping at my Knees
That imp of a "cleaning lady" hath wrought her usual havoc on our office. I hesitate to use the word "usual" to describe her dervishing of our little space: it implies some sort of predictability or routine to the anomie. She's an original. Her cleaning sprees are works of high-concept virtuosity and should not be held accountable to the stolid sobriety of reason. It is predictable that the office will be a touch tidier after she's visited, so I suppose there are certain patterns. It is also generally a rule that she will wash the coffee pot despite the obvious desuetude of such device (last week, I left the filter sitting on top of the coffee maker, which is where she had left it after cleaning it again - it is now re-cleaned).
Eight times out of ten, she will also close my office window and leave the blinds up in all of the offices, except my mother's office. I should clarify that the window to my office must be left open at all times, lest the infernal stuffiness of our antediluvian "HVAC" infest my office with febrile malaise.I may have to apply a shock mat to the window sill if this persists.
No matter how many times we reorganize the ordinal placement of garbage-plastic-paper bins, she will mix them up and something will succumb to the ravages muscle memory and gravity before this mix up is discovered (oh the fun I've had fishing trash from recycling).
This time, she apparently went spelunking around the crevices of my treadmill desk and debouched with several thousand paper clips and pens, which she then helpfully piled on top of my makeshift elevated mousepad before moving my keyboard and mousepad several inches askew of their intended location.
Her favorite editorial window appears to be my mother's desk. This admittedly has several objets d'stuff amassing in relevant corners, so it is quite rife for a canny eye to impose its vision. I have taken to tracking the metamorphoses in a photo album of before and after pics, trying to identify some semblance of a pattern in her reorganization
. It does appear she prefers a more open and rounded pattern. I am not sure that she thinks my mother's glass octopus should be too close to my mother's ceramic turtle, as they are always segregated by vast distance and barrier when we return from her cleaning weekends.
Perhaps they quarrel when she is there? She also has a very concerted preferential spot for my mother's business card holder at the expense of any photos. Despite the thorough redecoration and obsessive coffee machine scrubbing, she appears to have chosen to leave a mug of half-drunk tea sitting amid the desktop tableau. Unwashed. Still with a three-day old tea bag steeping.
Whatever windex-endust tsunami may have swept through here, it's mostly business as usual (har har, oh that word again) after a well-earned weekend. Yesterday Andrew and I expanded out date afternoon back to a Seattle sojourn and some cotton-candy balletic orgy of pink tutus, rhinestones, and giggling little girls in tiaras. I rue my current tu-tu-less status. I really should have taken advantage of our Sleeping Beauty tickets to go full throttle fairy-princess. Other than the minor height difference, I am sure I would have fit right in. As usual, I prefer the freedom and emotional oomph of the repertory pieces over the story-ballets, but sometimes you do just need to be drowned in ruffles I suppose. And sometimes, you need to be rescued by a pantless dude named Prince Florimund (I think +Andrew Wright and I have hit gold in the name-quest for our child replacement sphynx cat!! DING DING DING) running around the forest chasing a "fairy" to find some hot chick he'd hallucinated while hunting. And we definitely need him to kill old ladies after hacking through a bunch of foliage and trespassing.
And today, again absent of tutu (sob sob) I'll be back on duty for what will hopefully turn out to be a slightly more efficacious schedule-bound week. Back to the bands and bobbles first off. I am fairly certain this PT appointment remains at 8 a.m., so I'm all ready to fall all over myself. In addition to my double looby lady estrogen, I've just started with the double whammy of orange barracuda, so this whole "balance" thing my PT keeps wanting to work on with me... farcical and frolicsome!
But the fun doesn't stop there. I've got a collaborative law meeting to secretary today! Let the fringe fly as it may! We will sing several friggin' rounds of Kumba-bloody-ya (yipee kayumbaya mother-collorator!)
This of course rests on the supposition that time is back in functional order after my spell of distemporitis. Only time will tell on that note...
Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Valenfun
It's been a bit of a blustery work week, both literally and figuratively. In the all-engrossing weather news, our cold snap-crackle-pop has melted into a nice mushy February with a healthy bombast of gale. Actually, we were promised far more truly horrendous - albeit warm - weather than we have yet to receive. Somehow Bellingham has remained thoroughly nested in the midst of a blotchy radar screen, yet cradled in a surprisingly vernal bliss for the last couple of days. I don't expect this will endure, and the wind already rages through the night, but I shan't cadge too vociferously about the break.
For the figurative bluster, though, there is far less lucent tranquility. A series of little eruptions seemed hell bent on storming our upcoming long weekend and razing it to the ground, pillaging our peace of mind and snatching our equipoise for pelf. Fortunately, most fires have subsided to smoldering embers, and there's a sense of calm ... just in time for another slated AWOL-from-the-office day. Of course my prior AWOL-from-the-office days have faltered in whole or part, but surely the distemporitis is ebbing by now (knocks on wood). I shan't even list the proposed schedule, lest the fates be tempted to attack my poor masseur with a horrible plague, or to instigate a chemical meltdown at the YMCA.
Of course the Olympics continue on and I am dutifully doing my part as an apathetic American. Mostly, I've been loading up the NBC Gold Zone live feed (the only place I need to be apparently) in the morning and... well mostly ignoring it while pulling up another window and feverishly producing work product. But it's nice to have the very jovial brits chattering at me while I type away. From what I understand, there is some biathlon going on around the same time that some hockey games are happening. Which is better than I understood yesterday's speed skating. I do try to struggle through the live replays of the snowboarding events in the evenings, but NBC has not made the replay experience super user friendly - apparently after the event has aired in primetime, they actually bother to add the ability to pause and skip through, which is a far more useful feature than I'd ever imagined.
On the domestic Olympic front, Mr. (W)right topped his previously incredible "max heart rate" with a reported 240 on what was a fairly moderate effort. Believing himself not to be a guinea pig or other small rodent, he met this number with the appropriate amount of skepticism, and we have subsequently changed the battery for his heart rate monitor. Whether this has improved its accuracy or healed his tachycardia one can't say, but he now seems to log the anticipated highs and lows. Phew, bullet dodged! When my man goes, I want it to be hurtling down something stiff saying "wheeeeeee!" (not a death threat, I'm just being realistic here) and not from some freakish heart rate monitor's acid amercement.
And, my arch is edging towards functional with a wealth of patience and several silly exercises. I'm going to try tango for the first time in months this coming weekend. My stilettos haven't drawn blood in far too long, but I still think it may be a dance sneaker kind of joint.
Prince Florimund Has Had His Bon Bon! - A Tale of Legal Practice Gone Right.
Our office has been dribbling a case for several months on the hopes that the lawyer on the other side might eventually get back to us. "The other side" is represented by a great lawyer when he feels like being so, but he can sort of disappear for long spells of time before resurfacing in a flurry of urgency and activity. Once you accept this ebb and flow, and learn how to exploit the upswings, it's workable. He's great with difficult clients (his own), so it's often still a pleasure and a giddy rush hurling oneself through the occasional mad dashes for the finish line or bust.
In this case, both offices had an incentive to get final papers together ASAP. In theory, the finals ought to have been finalized months ago, but there's always that damned wagon wheel coffee table or two dollars difference in maintenance/child support over which to wage The Holy (sh**! for real??) Crusades, part fifty.
But yes, there was some external urgency in this case, so suddenly a case suffering freezer burn from its extended stay on ice was flaming hot and smoking up the air with a maelstrom of increasingly patchworked final papers (intitials upon initials upon exes upon text rewritten and unwritten and eensy post it notes with byzantine archaic languages indicating editorial notes only god could understand). A few days ago, the "finals" ended up back in our office.
Feeling the upsurge of immediacy, the other attorney, whom we shall call The Dude absent any justification for doing so, stopped in to check on them long before we'd had a chance to review the new and improved revisions upon revisions upon revisions upon revisions. The Dude is kind of a smart ass, as are many attorneys, of course. He also may harbor a minor amount of fear of Leslie, our paralegal/office manager (as should many attorneys, of course). He has a reason. She's not the most opaque of individuals. Being a paralegal herself, she's particularly sensitive to the way various attorneys treat their own paralegals (not as well as in our office, in which both attorneys were first paralegals so there's a health amount of respect going on). Not having been deadened to humanity by several years of the law school mill, she also hooks into several cases in a more personal way, which can get her quills riled a bit. The Dude, albeit not the primary magnet of her unabashed disdain, certainly can get the quills all shivery and shaky, which often inspires him to nervously up the wise-assery for a brief recursive cycle of quill rattling and snarking... up toward the inevitable nervous retreat.
At any rate, he stalked lightly into our office and tentatively asked Leslie (and me, as I'd poked out of my office) if it would be appropriate to offer an exchange of candy for finals. I queried as to the nature of candy and he showed a lifesaver mint. A paltry offering for such a turgid case, and I let him know as much. Since neither my mom nor my client had reviewed them, I felt fairly confident in holding out for superior offerings. I indicated that chocolate would be much more appropriate a price, before explaining that the papers weren' t quite ready. As he left, I let him know he could feel free to come back in a few hours with the aforementioned chocolate.
Eventually, some sort of implausible deal was met and the papers made it back upstairs for one final time. Without chocolate! I informed my mother of the potential squelching and she duly notified The Dude that we would await our pound of cocoa flesh (there is absolutely an exception in the comments of the Rules of Professional Conduct for chocolate). A day later there was some additional kerfuffle over the finals and one additional point of agreement had to be made. He responded "no problem, no entry, no chocolate" and my mother threatened to sic [sic] me on him, cc'ing me on the exchange.
As a responsible attorney, I unleashed Prince Florimund (or at least a photo of what looks an awful like my imaginary child-surrogate sphinx cat in a halloween tutu and tiara) with the message "Prince Florimund shall have his bon bon!!!" After some further exchanges, Prince Florimund threatened to move into his office, and to ruffle up his client files, while The Dude threatened to get an ex parte restraining order against Prince F, and somewhere in there a dog was introduced into the exchange, at which point Prince Florimund felt disgusted and went to take an angry nap.
I figured that this was the end of the exchange. Once an imaginary cat stalks off for an angry nap, the games tend to shut down as a matter of course. But midday yesterday, The Dude snuck into our office, slammed down three (surprisingly well-chosen) chocolate bars on Leslie's desk and said "I don't want to hear anymore about this" before leaving again. Since my mom doesn't like chocolate and Leslie is on some kind of diet, Prince Florimund and I got them all.
See, it's moments like these that make me love my work... Oh also the preserving families and helping amicable and creative yadda yadda yadda, but mostly the whole extorting chocolate from other attorneys with imaginary child surrogate cats in silly costumes.
Also, it's V-Day! So there's that.Happy hearts and chocolates Friday!
Coverage Will Resume Momentarily Olympic Waiting.
It's the weekend again, so naturally I'm camped out from 5 a.m. onward in front of some sort of computer device (next to a smart phone device, beside a tablet device while tip-a-tap-typing on an ultrabook device) watching... the promise of the Olympics. Sort of a pleasant and mellow blue screen of not-quite-death. The cerulean screen of somnolence, perhaps. I believe these are the little spaces reserved for commercials in the prime time airings of these events. Or maybe NBC just understands that the pleasure of enjoyable things is counter-intuitively enhanced when interrupted. Of course, given the rest of NBC's treacly maddening montage-moon-shine-and-shimmer coverage, I'm not sure I want to give them that much credit. But the cerulean screens do have a peaceful property about them that's nice for a slow toe-dip into the day.
Today's major non-blue-screen even seems to be USA versus Russia in men's hockey. I'm thinking that we should redefine the scoring system from "goals scored" to times you can hit members of the other team with your enormous stick and make it look "like an accident". Because then this would be a pretty high scoring exciting game. I don't regularly follow hockey. There's not really a local team to get behind and if there were, I'd likely find the ice rink far too gelid for my sensitive Reynaud's-chic toesies. But I do enjoy watching it. The way the skaters glide through space is quite exquisitely graceful, a splendid sweet to the tang of violence afoot.Sometimes I can stare vacantly at the gently lulling camera panoramas, not entirely following who's doing what to whom and why (but knowing if exciting things are happening because the announcers start to yell every time they hit the puck)
The distemporitis of last week persisted despite my best efforts to maintain confidentiality from and negotiate a cease-fire with the fates. On Thursday, I did make it to my PT appointment, but (as has been the trend) everything else melted away like icing in suds. Azita was consumed by work, so I did my YMCA jaunt alone. Leslie was beset by lurgy, so our office lunch was cancelled. And Massage Envy called to let me know Nick was unable to make my appointment (they're spotting me half of the cost of my next one for the trouble, so I'm not complaining).
And yesterday, Andrew got only a mild hit of it when our plans to meet at 6ish were forestalled by the usual dreck and blerg of Everett traffic. We ended up at the Chinese takeout place by my house instead. I was aiming for somewhere high unromatic to beat the crowds. This turned out to be a pretty safe bet (although Andrew surprised me with hidden bijoux throughout the day and I assaulted him with stealth chocolates, and we got to come home together, so I'd call it a saccharine sweet little V-D after all).
I imagine this distemporitis will further afflict Andrew's likelihood of actually having that second session with the personal trainer, since Mark/Marian/He of the effulgent frames that i never saw has yet to respond to Andrew's request for confirmation.
Fortunately, I don't have too many plans this weekend. I've learned they'll all fall apart. Ok, I'm supposed to help teach at the Tango Experience tonight. My first time out since these recent foot troubles. Thinking I won't stay around too long, but would like people to at least remember my face and/or my socks before retreating back into obscurity. But with my luck so far, I'm not sure the studio won't burn down before we get to that.
And Russian scores! Somebody made a goal and stuff. With a stick. On the ice. See, I know my hockey.
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