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captainsblogYa, been a busy week here on the frozen tundra, yaknow?
Sorry. We just finished the tenth and final episode of the latest season of Fargo (very well done but very violent), and the Minnesota Nice dialect tends to stick with:
I'll start with the status of That Case, which I've spoken a lot about of late, much of it from a Debbie Downer point of view. Yes, it's been hard. Yes, I took some judicial grief for the way things went initially. Still, I always had the sense that I was dealing all around with good people with good intentions and that we would find a way to convey that by the time of a scheduled hearing in the case this past Thursday. First, though, came a directive from the judge, set in stone the previous Tuesday, to supplement the previous filing in the case with Real Actual Numbers no later than 3 p.m. on the Monday before the hearing. Never mind that "the Monday before the hearing" was a federal holiday; apparently a federal judge can override that. The client and the other main party to the agreement spent the better part of Thursday through that Monday working on those numbers. Our first snowstorm travel ban finally lifted at 3:30 that Sunday, but I had neither need nor desire to go anywhere, figuring I would go in to our otherwise closed office on Monday afternoon and plug in the numbers I was given, or, well, baffle them with bullshit if I didn't have any.
By 1 p.m., I had few final numbers and the ones I had did not look promising to reach desired results. Nonetheless, a deadline is a deadline, and I just wrote my way through the muck as best I could to make it by 3 p.m.- firing it off to the client to review and sign at 2:12; getting a version back with comments (mostly consisting of "DON'T SAY THAT!" from the other party) at 2:30, sending a revised version without saying "that" at 2:34, waiting with bated breath for another 15-plus minutes for a signature, finally getting it at 2:52, learning things about revision protocols in the current version of Word at 2:55 before almost sending in the wrong version, but finally getting a clean PDF ready, logging in, sending it to the court, and getting the confirming notification at....
You'd think I'd planned it that way. I assure you I did not.
The next three days were herding other cats- multiple other parties involved in the transaction including three government attorneys' offices- and by the time the hearing went live at 11 this past Thursday morning, we'd made remarkable progress. The judge told us right out that when the whole thing first came in weeks before, he was almost certainly inclined to say "no" to it all, but through all of our hard work in getting to the best results we could, he told us he's prepared to approve it as soon as those three government attorneys sign off on some revisions to the underlying deal that everyone, more or less, is already in agreement on. We spent the rest of Thursday, into Friday, sending around revised drafts with those changes, and nothing is final as of now because government attorneys generally don't work weekends like I do, but I feel infinitely better about the whole business than I did the last several times I've written about it.
Better, even, than my subconscious apparently felt the night before the Thursday hearing. I expected insomnia from the anxiety about it and I got it, but I did get one final two-hour trip into Dreamland before I had to get going that morning. Two things I remember from that: one, breaking my almost 27 straight months of sobriety with not one but two drinks at a bar somewhere (one beer, I don't remember what the other was); and two, securing a ticket to a Buffalo studio audience for a talk show by legendary journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers. Never mind that I can't think of a reason in the world why my subconscious would have brought HIM up; I checked and was pleased to see that at least he's not dead (he turns 90 later this year), but he hasn't had a regular talk or commentary gig on PBS or anywhere since 2015, and I can't remember seeing anything in the news by or about him, recently or ever.
The following three nights have brought much better sleep, and by this time next week, one way or another, This Anxiety from That Case should all be behind me.
----
The other main event of the past week has been the weather. Our midweek event was never quite the complete shutdown that came over the previous weekend- which imposed a countywide travel ban, closed virtually all businesses and even postponed the Bills' first playoff game into late Monday- but our immediate area probably got just as much snow from Tuesday night into Friday as we had the previous weekend.
Most of Tuesday was sunny and quiet, but by Wednesday morning, the BEEEEEEP! warnings on our phones fired up again, and apparently God and Zeus and Thor got the message and started piling up the snow for us again:
The main reason I was paying such attention on Wednesday was being scheduled to be in Cheektowaga Town Court at 8:30 that morning on an appearance ticket for a client for not renewing her dog license. (She'd surrendered it to an adoption agency, which didn't bother to submit the right form- or maybe submitted it with the word dog crossed out and the word "cat" written in crayon.) I got as far as showering and pulling out a dress shirt and dark socks before checking the almighty list of official cancellations:
I may be a scwewy wabbit, but I'm not goin' toAlcatawz Cheektovegas!
No word yet on when, or even if, it will be rescheduled. Thanks to that, I never even left the house on Wednesday other than to take Pepper out with me to the curb at the end of the day to haul out the totes (picked up a day late on Friday) and to take her on a very short walk. Neighbors with a snowblower had very kindly cleared our sidewalk; I did our front steps and walkway the following morning before finally heading back out into civilization later on Thursday. This second blast also postponed a major league event by a day, the Sabres' Wednesday night game being pushed into Thursday, but other than that, and several more feet falling to the south where the Bills play again tonight, there's been relatively little angst about it all.
We got back to our usual weekend routines now that the worst of all of these is behind us: my first workout (other than shoveling) in over a week yesterday, and the dog and I out on a local trail with friends this morning. I'm heading soon to the library to pick up a movie by and about a guy we both independently discovered on podcasts- this one, which also features Lauren Ambrose, one of my alltime actress crushes-
- and then the Bills on the tv, with their final home game of the season, win or lose. Taylor Swift is supposedly in town to cheer on her BF. We still have time to convert her;)
Sorry. We just finished the tenth and final episode of the latest season of Fargo (very well done but very violent), and the Minnesota Nice dialect tends to stick with:
I'll start with the status of That Case, which I've spoken a lot about of late, much of it from a Debbie Downer point of view. Yes, it's been hard. Yes, I took some judicial grief for the way things went initially. Still, I always had the sense that I was dealing all around with good people with good intentions and that we would find a way to convey that by the time of a scheduled hearing in the case this past Thursday. First, though, came a directive from the judge, set in stone the previous Tuesday, to supplement the previous filing in the case with Real Actual Numbers no later than 3 p.m. on the Monday before the hearing. Never mind that "the Monday before the hearing" was a federal holiday; apparently a federal judge can override that. The client and the other main party to the agreement spent the better part of Thursday through that Monday working on those numbers. Our first snowstorm travel ban finally lifted at 3:30 that Sunday, but I had neither need nor desire to go anywhere, figuring I would go in to our otherwise closed office on Monday afternoon and plug in the numbers I was given, or, well, baffle them with bullshit if I didn't have any.
By 1 p.m., I had few final numbers and the ones I had did not look promising to reach desired results. Nonetheless, a deadline is a deadline, and I just wrote my way through the muck as best I could to make it by 3 p.m.- firing it off to the client to review and sign at 2:12; getting a version back with comments (mostly consisting of "DON'T SAY THAT!" from the other party) at 2:30, sending a revised version without saying "that" at 2:34, waiting with bated breath for another 15-plus minutes for a signature, finally getting it at 2:52, learning things about revision protocols in the current version of Word at 2:55 before almost sending in the wrong version, but finally getting a clean PDF ready, logging in, sending it to the court, and getting the confirming notification at....
You'd think I'd planned it that way. I assure you I did not.
The next three days were herding other cats- multiple other parties involved in the transaction including three government attorneys' offices- and by the time the hearing went live at 11 this past Thursday morning, we'd made remarkable progress. The judge told us right out that when the whole thing first came in weeks before, he was almost certainly inclined to say "no" to it all, but through all of our hard work in getting to the best results we could, he told us he's prepared to approve it as soon as those three government attorneys sign off on some revisions to the underlying deal that everyone, more or less, is already in agreement on. We spent the rest of Thursday, into Friday, sending around revised drafts with those changes, and nothing is final as of now because government attorneys generally don't work weekends like I do, but I feel infinitely better about the whole business than I did the last several times I've written about it.
Better, even, than my subconscious apparently felt the night before the Thursday hearing. I expected insomnia from the anxiety about it and I got it, but I did get one final two-hour trip into Dreamland before I had to get going that morning. Two things I remember from that: one, breaking my almost 27 straight months of sobriety with not one but two drinks at a bar somewhere (one beer, I don't remember what the other was); and two, securing a ticket to a Buffalo studio audience for a talk show by legendary journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers. Never mind that I can't think of a reason in the world why my subconscious would have brought HIM up; I checked and was pleased to see that at least he's not dead (he turns 90 later this year), but he hasn't had a regular talk or commentary gig on PBS or anywhere since 2015, and I can't remember seeing anything in the news by or about him, recently or ever.
The following three nights have brought much better sleep, and by this time next week, one way or another, This Anxiety from That Case should all be behind me.
----
The other main event of the past week has been the weather. Our midweek event was never quite the complete shutdown that came over the previous weekend- which imposed a countywide travel ban, closed virtually all businesses and even postponed the Bills' first playoff game into late Monday- but our immediate area probably got just as much snow from Tuesday night into Friday as we had the previous weekend.
Most of Tuesday was sunny and quiet, but by Wednesday morning, the BEEEEEEP! warnings on our phones fired up again, and apparently God and Zeus and Thor got the message and started piling up the snow for us again:
The main reason I was paying such attention on Wednesday was being scheduled to be in Cheektowaga Town Court at 8:30 that morning on an appearance ticket for a client for not renewing her dog license. (She'd surrendered it to an adoption agency, which didn't bother to submit the right form- or maybe submitted it with the word dog crossed out and the word "cat" written in crayon.) I got as far as showering and pulling out a dress shirt and dark socks before checking the almighty list of official cancellations:
I may be a scwewy wabbit, but I'm not goin' to
No word yet on when, or even if, it will be rescheduled. Thanks to that, I never even left the house on Wednesday other than to take Pepper out with me to the curb at the end of the day to haul out the totes (picked up a day late on Friday) and to take her on a very short walk. Neighbors with a snowblower had very kindly cleared our sidewalk; I did our front steps and walkway the following morning before finally heading back out into civilization later on Thursday. This second blast also postponed a major league event by a day, the Sabres' Wednesday night game being pushed into Thursday, but other than that, and several more feet falling to the south where the Bills play again tonight, there's been relatively little angst about it all.
We got back to our usual weekend routines now that the worst of all of these is behind us: my first workout (other than shoveling) in over a week yesterday, and the dog and I out on a local trail with friends this morning. I'm heading soon to the library to pick up a movie by and about a guy we both independently discovered on podcasts- this one, which also features Lauren Ambrose, one of my alltime actress crushes-
- and then the Bills on the tv, with their final home game of the season, win or lose. Taylor Swift is supposedly in town to cheer on her BF. We still have time to convert her;)