Northward and Upward
Jan. 29th, 2022 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogAnother workweek, almost another whole month, in the books. All in all, they've been going well, if tiring at times. Wednesday was a scenic tour between two counties north and east of here- as far of either as I've driven in almost two years. Only 200 miles on the tires, but plenty of tire on the old guy by the time I rolled in the door just around 5. The appointments themselves went fine; it was the messaging in between them with a different client that cast a pall on the whole day.
Client was a one-off referral. I don't know where the other attorney got him. For me, a straightforward job, which I proposed doing on my straightforward terms. He negotiated a better (for him) deal, and I started. It ended successfully either last Friday or sometime Tuesday (depending on your definition of success), so I sent out my final bill. During my drive Wednesday was when he tried reopening the negotiations through emails. By the end of the day, I was done responding to emails, so I just called the guy and offered a compromise. Nope. I finally agreed to his supposed bottom-line number, but made clear that if that was it, that was IT. We were done, with no further work to be done as long as I wasn't being paid a reasonable amount for work I'd already done.
Because this?
Imma only doing that once.
He called the next day, offering a little more if he could pay it in installments. He also wanted to know about me doing more work. I answered, no, and no. I was out yesterday when the check showed up for what I'd agreed to as a going-away present. In the end, I'm glad I wasn't there to talk to him. It wasn't much of a discrepancy in real terms- what he paid wasn't much, but what I was owed wasn't that much more- but I have to balance my need for respect with their need for being respected.
It's still bugging me, but I think I did the right thing.
----
A friend is having one of his short plays performed at a nearby live venue this weekend. The premiere was last night, but there are two more, this afternoon and tonight. Ordinarily, we'd have loved to have gone to support his work, but even he wasn't able to attend because he has come down with something. He didn't specifically mention the C-word, but it still seems that every day I'm hearing about SOMEONE being down for the count with it. I picked up a couple of the free home test kits when checking out a DVD at the library the other day, so if I have any suspicion of being exposed, we can quickly check it out. Meanwhile, another local theater group that I'd submitted a short play to was going to have a live performance of the chosen ones this month. (Mine was turned down for a live show, but it was still being considered for a Zoom production in March.) Well, now the live one has also been postponed until March, due to the risks of infection to cast, crew and audience. Meanwhile, the anti-vaxxers march on, opposing public health at every turn.
Fun wow.
----
Instead of a play for entertainment last night, we started a binge of the early episodes of Northern Exposure. We watched it regularly when it was first on between 1989 and 1995, and Eleanor picked up the DVD set of the first season a few years back, but for whatever reason it just never clicked to go back to it until now.
Now it does. Maybe it's because I thought I remembered the premise, the quirky characters and the storylines well enough and they didn't need reinforcing. But just the pilot and the second episode, watched last night, reminded us just how good the writing and performances were. In the second episode, there was a definite prediction of the strange times we live in now, even stranger than their occasional trebucheting of a coffin. Chris in the Morning, the town radio station's DJ, gets in trouble with his boss and is briefly fired for monologuing about the sexual preferences of Walt Whitman; several scenes later, Ruth-Anne, proprietor of the town's general store and librarian of its several borrowing shelves, notes that their entire collection of Whitman books has been checked out. If that seems like "it could never happen in real life," this week has been full of stories of library and school district purges and bans of books, including one in Tennessee of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus about the Holocaust. (It has bad words and a tittie, you see; plus, some of them Nazis were very fine people:P). Within a day or so, Amazon was completely sold out of the book.
The series wound up lasting six years, two longer than Joel's original contract to pay for his medical school. I don't think we stayed on for all six during its original run, parenting having arrived for us about halfway through, so I didn't even remember that Rob Morrow was replaced by a new doctor played by Paul Provenza at the end. I doubt we'll stay on for all 110 of them this time, either, but it's a nice switch from Succession's all-too-real backstabbing and fuck-offery.
There was talk of a reboot a while back, but one of the show's creators died in 2019 and that seems to have put an end to that. If the trebuchet's still lying around on a CBS backlot, though? I've got some people I might want to introduce to it....
Client was a one-off referral. I don't know where the other attorney got him. For me, a straightforward job, which I proposed doing on my straightforward terms. He negotiated a better (for him) deal, and I started. It ended successfully either last Friday or sometime Tuesday (depending on your definition of success), so I sent out my final bill. During my drive Wednesday was when he tried reopening the negotiations through emails. By the end of the day, I was done responding to emails, so I just called the guy and offered a compromise. Nope. I finally agreed to his supposed bottom-line number, but made clear that if that was it, that was IT. We were done, with no further work to be done as long as I wasn't being paid a reasonable amount for work I'd already done.
Because this?
Imma only doing that once.
He called the next day, offering a little more if he could pay it in installments. He also wanted to know about me doing more work. I answered, no, and no. I was out yesterday when the check showed up for what I'd agreed to as a going-away present. In the end, I'm glad I wasn't there to talk to him. It wasn't much of a discrepancy in real terms- what he paid wasn't much, but what I was owed wasn't that much more- but I have to balance my need for respect with their need for being respected.
It's still bugging me, but I think I did the right thing.
----
A friend is having one of his short plays performed at a nearby live venue this weekend. The premiere was last night, but there are two more, this afternoon and tonight. Ordinarily, we'd have loved to have gone to support his work, but even he wasn't able to attend because he has come down with something. He didn't specifically mention the C-word, but it still seems that every day I'm hearing about SOMEONE being down for the count with it. I picked up a couple of the free home test kits when checking out a DVD at the library the other day, so if I have any suspicion of being exposed, we can quickly check it out. Meanwhile, another local theater group that I'd submitted a short play to was going to have a live performance of the chosen ones this month. (Mine was turned down for a live show, but it was still being considered for a Zoom production in March.) Well, now the live one has also been postponed until March, due to the risks of infection to cast, crew and audience. Meanwhile, the anti-vaxxers march on, opposing public health at every turn.
Fun wow.
----
Instead of a play for entertainment last night, we started a binge of the early episodes of Northern Exposure. We watched it regularly when it was first on between 1989 and 1995, and Eleanor picked up the DVD set of the first season a few years back, but for whatever reason it just never clicked to go back to it until now.
Now it does. Maybe it's because I thought I remembered the premise, the quirky characters and the storylines well enough and they didn't need reinforcing. But just the pilot and the second episode, watched last night, reminded us just how good the writing and performances were. In the second episode, there was a definite prediction of the strange times we live in now, even stranger than their occasional trebucheting of a coffin. Chris in the Morning, the town radio station's DJ, gets in trouble with his boss and is briefly fired for monologuing about the sexual preferences of Walt Whitman; several scenes later, Ruth-Anne, proprietor of the town's general store and librarian of its several borrowing shelves, notes that their entire collection of Whitman books has been checked out. If that seems like "it could never happen in real life," this week has been full of stories of library and school district purges and bans of books, including one in Tennessee of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus about the Holocaust. (It has bad words and a tittie, you see; plus, some of them Nazis were very fine people:P). Within a day or so, Amazon was completely sold out of the book.
The series wound up lasting six years, two longer than Joel's original contract to pay for his medical school. I don't think we stayed on for all six during its original run, parenting having arrived for us about halfway through, so I didn't even remember that Rob Morrow was replaced by a new doctor played by Paul Provenza at the end. I doubt we'll stay on for all 110 of them this time, either, but it's a nice switch from Succession's all-too-real backstabbing and fuck-offery.
There was talk of a reboot a while back, but one of the show's creators died in 2019 and that seems to have put an end to that. If the trebuchet's still lying around on a CBS backlot, though? I've got some people I might want to introduce to it....