Dear 2017:

Yes, you. "Anno Domini 2017." There, I even used your middle name so you'll know this is serious.

You've been talking to your older brother, haven't you?  I didn't have to sit HIM down and have The Talk about his behavior until the last day of January, 2016, and yet here you are, on the bench outside the principal's office not even four full days in.

The concerns aren't the same- yet.  My big deal with Big Bro was his whole thing with the scythe and the sackcloth right from the get-go; as I summarized soon after he nuked Alan Rickman midway through the year's first month:

Not just Rickman, of course. Bowie. Monte Irvin (a Hall of Famer from 50s baseball and the third to follow Jackie Robinson across the color barrier). Jim Simpson, who along with Sandy Koufax broadcast the first World Series I ever watched on television in 1967.  Ted Marchibroda, who essentially designed the offense that put the Bills in four straight Super Bowls.  In the music world, Bowie was followed by local country legend "Ramblin Lou" Schriver, Glenn Frey, and just the other day, the heart and soul of Jefferson Everything, Paul Kantner.

That doesn't even mention Abe Vigoda, who died five days before that post and who generated the biggest surprise in that he hadn't died 20 or 30 years before that.

So far, I don't recognize a single one of your victims in that department- more a function of only settling up four days into the year-  but already you're getting on my nerves both nationally and personally.

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I know, any Oran-gitas I have about the impending doom of 20 January is your brother's fault.  But it only took three days on your watch before his minions in Congress started serious fucking about. First they tried to eviscerate a key ethics function within the Capitol, only to have Drumpf issue a "tweeto" to stop them from doing so- for now. (The message, essentially, was "not when anybody's watching.")  Then one of their craziest members introduced a bill to prevent the Supreme Court from recognizing its own precedents in any case involving Obamacare, which they are determined to push off a cliff regardless of the inhabitants of the village lying directly below.  Great thinking- why not ban the SCOTUS from citing to Roe v. Wade, or Loving v. Virginia, or Brown v. Board of Education while you're at it?  That'd REALLY make America great white again.

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In my own closer-to-home life, today was the first to produce genuine suckage.  The client who I spent much of Monday writing for, and almost all of yesterday organizing, filing and serving for? Turned out today to be the subject of a perfectly clustery fuckup.  The judge's clerk called: I'd submitted an unsigned affidavit for the client- one of two prepared for the task.  Barely 24 hours before, I'd literally pointed at the signature lines on the TWO of them, grunted, and said, "Sign. Sign. Notarize. Notarize."  By the latter, I meant "take both across the hall to BE notarized, since I don't have my stamp."  Sure enough, in the intervening 20 feet, the client only signed one and handed over one to be notarized- even though the notary specifically asked if that was it.  No, it wasn't; and now I have stamp ink egg on my face as a result.

Not satisfied with fucking up my litigation, you then toyed with my real-estating.  A much-struggled client's refi was finally cleared to close- yay!  All they needed was a payoff from the previous mortgage!  Which I asked for right after talking to the clerk in A-One-and-a-Two-A-ffidavit-gate.  Instead, by day's end, two brand new roadblocks had popped up. One, an old credit (not title) item from 1998, involving a student loan debt, which were invented by Sisyphus and are as hard to push over the top of the hill; the other, a PITA payoff department involving the old mortgage which is turning up its nose at being paid in full because, hey, late fees and other charges are much more fun!

Plus, the decision from December 22 that I wound up losing, and the closings I can't get put on record, and the et cetera and the et cetera and the et cetera.  That's why I left work early today, because when you can't say something nice,... blog about it later:P

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OK, it hasn't been ALL bad.

I got off a visual joke on the missus on New Years Day (Observed):



Various friends who've seen that have suggested Bible passages I should've opened it to: Romans 10, the Sermon on the Mount, and my personal choice of the 23rd Psalm ("my cup runneth over but we have a drain below the bar").

You've also given us a nice film to watch (La La Land) and a forgotten Sherlock episode to finish (including this recap making clear that Moff and Mark are messing with the concept of "jump the shark").

And little snow, a relatively clear calendar for at least the rest of this week, and no DEATH. Yet.

So press on and head for Portugal better results from here on out. We'll be watching.