captainsblog | And Dad's All He Wrote....

Just got my Father's Day call from Emily. She's doing well, other than a minor mishap where both she and Cam got stung by the same yellow jacket. (The cashier at Timmy's wished me one, too, because Doggie Daddies are important, too:) I have little good to say about my own dad, but it's comforting to have good things said about how I've done.

The preceding week was busier than all get-out. In all, six different court appearances in five different places in four different cities/towns. Two of the quickest and easiest were traffic court appearances; I don't do any other kind of criminal law, but these are essentially printing money, both for me and the municipalities. They have it down to a science everywhere I've gone; the lawyers jump the line, get a quick plea bargain from the prosecutor to a non-point ticket (usually parking or, one this week, jaywalking), get it approved by the judge in moments, get your client two weeks to pay, turn the bill into their legal plan. Easy peasy. But not without the occasional weirdy: in Friday afternoon's finale of my workweek, the courtroom has a big-screen TV turned on facing the teeming hordes. No sound, but playing something called the Escape Channel. Hopefully not giving any ideas to the occasional shackled defendants brought in by the sheriff for more serious violations. And what's playing over the prosecutor's head as he's dispensing justice one $50-200 parking ticket at a time?

No comment.

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Before that finale, I spent much of Thursday signing up four clients for new Rochester bankruptcy filings. That's a one-day record, and it would've been five if one other had gotten in before I had to leave to see a bunny walk into a bar (I'll get to that). When I went to check their actual computer files to transmit the cases, I discovered I'd made a bit of a boo-boo: the last client's electronic file was completely blank. I had to wait to get home to see if I'd saved the newer version on my other laptop, and no; in my anal attempts to stay backed up at all times, I'd gone dyslectic and overwrote the newest version with the original one. That meant starting over, but would it be from scratch? I use a service to import debt information directly from the client's credit report, and had done so (and paid to do so) for this one- but while the report was still on my computer, I couldn't find any way to re-import without starting completely over. Fortunately, tech support clued me in to the Super Sekrit Keyboard Kode to do it (control-shift-S, in case I ever have to do it again), and the reconstruction took less than an hour instead of the many hours it would otherwise have been. Then, after getting my cases all assigned late Friday night, I couldn't download their formal court notices on Saturday. Our court is upgrading its electronic system to something they're referring to, with no irony at all, as "Next Generation ECF." The transition is next weekend, but the clerks have been panicked about how old fart users won't take the necessary steps to access it ahead of the conversion. I've gotten emails and at least one phone call to make sure I'm good with it all. So what better way to prepare for the inevitable Next Generation System Crash than to crash the old system on its final weekend.

I blame Captain Picard;)

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But it hasn't been All Work and No Play.

I ended Thursday's signup marathon by meeting Eleanor's brother at the fundraiser for Project 153. This is the labor of love I mentioned last week from the owner of Abilene (153 is the house number on the former house now housing Danny's bar) to support a crisis nursery in two Rochester locations. We met up for sodas, pizza, good music from a local trio, and, as mentioned, a white rabbit sitting at the bar:

Honest, we hadn't a drop to drink;)

Charlie contributed to our membership in the project, and we are now invited to four national-act shows on the Abilene stage in the coming year. The first, on July 7, is by a remarkable sounding woman named Eilen Jewell.

Then came yesterday. I'd heard about an effort this weekend to open a number of usually inaccessible Buffalo buildings, from historic to just interesting in place or function, to a day of public tours. When I heard my friend Scott from Rochester was bringing his son to see some of them, I headed down for much of the afternoon. After our obligatory hotdogging at Ted's on Chippewa, and after I'd wandered round some of the other historic sites including the eponymous Goldome Branch of M&T Bank, I engineered my way onto a behind-the-scenes tour of Electric Tower, longtime home of Niagara Mohawk and other legacy Buffalo-Niagara electric companies. Many of these are pictures of pictures, on the back-room walls our guide took us to:

Clockwise from top left: a 30s photo of the elevator doors from the art deco era of the interior; another 30s shot looking up at the tower from a manhole during the eventual installation of fire hydrant water supplies; another art deco mural from that time (the building itself predates the architectural style but it added elements); and my only actual photo of the four, of the 16th floor "belfry"- originally a conference room, with a spiral staircase running to the tippity top.

They also opened a couple of offices we could visit and photograph of and from. This tech company's conference room featured this display of Pond and Sword, and therefore of course of a Strange Woman Lying behind it:

(I saw at least three people pull that sword out. But none of them wanted to rule England now with all this Brexit crap;)

As we headed down the stairs and parted, Scott and I speculated on whether Rochester would ever do something similar. We quickly named a close-to-equal number of buildings and other sites that could be on offer. I did notice, earlier in the week, that there is some effort to recognize the historic in my home away from home. Stopping at a Main Street bank before court last Wednesday, I saw Freddie D standing on State Street for the first time:

That QR code at his feet points to this site and some of the Fourth of July speech Douglass gave in the city's long-demolished Corinthian Hall. Sadly, the legacy of his Underground Railroad is becoming as hard to access as the actual underground subway.

The following day, I walked into the same courthouse and reclaimed some history of my own. In the security line right ahead of me were a lawyer I barely recognized and a woman with him I swore looked familiar. Once I saw what case and firm they were on, I connected it: she was a paralegal I'd helped hire at my original firm more than 30 years ago, who I had not seen in over 25, but who didn't look a day older all these years later. I walked over during a break, and as soon as she made the connection, I got a big hug and a bigger story: Jackie's still with that firm, but as of this week, she will be there as an attorney, since she's being admitted to the Bar. Our kids are a few months apart, and she remembered me visiting her at Strong when her son, a preemie, was in NICU in his earliest days. He is now also 27, and is getting married this summer.

Fathers and Mothers. Good thing we get chances to remember what that's about.

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I'll end with one other funny from the week. We were both up early yesterday because we'd been given a window for the arrival and installation of our new dryer as being from 7 to 11 a.m. They got here well before 8 and were done with it all in lickety-split time. (Gods, it's so quiet compared to when the previous one even actually worked!) I decided to save the dryer box in unbroken-up condition; our neighbors' young son has quite the imagination, and I thought he might like to make a time machine out of it or something. When I got home from the tour and some other errands, the box was gone- except it wasn't. Leaving for the dog park by a different route this morning, I saw it had blown past half a dozen houses, run a stop sign, and was sitting on a lawn closer to a second such sign.

Yeah, it was windy around here yesterday, but I had no idea it was THAT much wind. So I went to reclaim it and bust it up, and discovered there was lettuce and a paper plate inside it.