All Full Up.

The calendar tells me that I have posted at least one entry a day here every day of this year so far.  I suspect that's about to change.

Work will be a bear this week: hearings every day except Tuesday, three of them out of town, today's and Thursday's in Rochester and likely consuming most of each day.  Friday's will again be in Olean, only this time from there I will be heading the other way, hoping to make Asheville NC by nightfall, to help welcome bluesilverkdg into her new home there. I am hoping to catch any or many more of you en route, which will be mostly I-79 down and I-81 back. The actual warm de house is 5 on Saturday in the hopefully not-too-alien part of Mars Hill, so I'll likely have opps earlier that day and earlyish the next before returning to the land of Northern Aggression.  I also have to work in getting the oil changed, the tires checked and some other pre-trippy things done in assorted hours before leaving for the long haul Friday morning.

Dreams lately have been exceeding weird and are mostly travel-related. Plus, I've been reading two non-fiction works at once (one here, one at the gym) involving true crime and Prohibition, and since Elliot Ness has made an appearance in both of them, so that probably explains why I've awakened from at least one of them trying to get handcuffs of a certain annoying bankruptcy trustee who somehow cuffed himself to a debtor's briefcase.

In which I am shocked, SHOCKED!

....to have been treated with excessive decency by three straight civil servants in my clerk and court rounds this afternoon.

First stop: file a simple document with a clerk, cross-referenced to one already filed. The prior one was identified by a number which the process server neglected to inscribe on the document, and I had no independent idea of what it was. So after waiting through several other customers, I got to the head of the line and was rejected for lack of this bit of trivia. She did, however, hold my spot while I went and looked it up, only to get it wrong when I did so. This time, she was so appalled by my cluelessness, she found it in their computer herself and got me on my way with maybe only two minutes wasted. In a clerk's office, that's pretty close to record time.

Next stop: file another simple document with a different clerk, this one a new filing so it generates a new case number. This went swimmingly, until I went to pay. At that moment, it would seem, the entire financial structure of the Unified Court System came to a grinding halt, and no number of shutdowns and reboots could bring my transaction (or any of that cashier's dozens of earlier ones) back to life.  Hesitatingly, I offered to pass on the physical receipt if she'd just give me my file-stamped copy with the magic case number on it (the canceled check will do nicely as proof of payment). Not only did she accede to this severe breach of protocol, she even offered to paperclip the receipt to the file in case I wanted to reclaim it later.

Finally came the one actual court appearance, scheduled for 4 but resolved well in advance of that with a government attorney. My client was giving me very little leeway to work things out, and I offered what seemed a presumptuous affront to the other side in terms of how much of a delay they'd accept. He gave me twice what I'd asked for. I was thrilled, and relieved. I rarely find civil servants to be as stereotypical-DMV bad as they're made out to be, but it's unusual to run across three going above and beyond within the span of a couple of hours.

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Leaving court, I got a bit of a laugh. The Federal Building/Courthouse in downtown Rochester is at the oxymoronic intersection of Church and State streets. Kittycorner to it, on the side nearer my usual parking ramp, is a butt ugly brick building that would probably be more valuable demolished and turned into parking spaces, yet for virtually all of the 26 years since I first hung out down there, it's been home to an endless parade of restaurants. In recent years, they've tried a bunch of higher-end concepts- Caribbean, barbecue, even a tapas place for a bit, plus the standard runs (possibly literally after many a meal) of no-name Chinese places and pseudo-Garbage Plate distributors. It was closed last time I went by last month- not an unusual condition in its long history- but the New Management has apparently decided to go with a much more down-to-earth concept. So down to earth, in fact, it might actually be in it:



Eventually, I remembered that its original downtown incarnation, from my earliest days working there, was something called The Lunch Box. Not that sign- it was one of those Pepsi-advertising jobs you see everywhere- but I also remember those folks selling it, where one of my partners from back then represented one of the parties. It became a bit of a problem when the all-cash buyer showed up at the closing with, you guessed it, all cash. As in wads of Benjamins. Apparently nobody had explained currency reporting rules to these folks, and I think the closing had to be canceled before The Lunch Box turned quickly into The Prison Cell for the client or, worse, for us.

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Totally non-apropos of any of that:

Anyone know what this is?



Emily's guess was Jabba the Hutt, I saw some rubber-ducky resemblance, but otherwise it's got us swinging. Looks to be a coccoon of some sort.