All in All, An Awesome Mix of a Week:)

Not every moment was. There were wins, losses and a few near-misses, good and bad; there were endings and new beginnings. All part of being alive and well in the world.

The Mets were largely a Met-aphor for how things were going. I went to sleep Monday night with them sitting comfortably on a five-run lead late in the game; they blew it.  Tuesday morning didn't get any better when I discovered the dog had pooped in the living room, and not for the first time in recent months. This began some worry on our part that she may be reaching the end of days (the grrl is heading fast toward 16 years old, after all), but the past few days have brought improvement.  For one thing, I wondered if she was as emotionally affected by the snow and cold and general dark of recent weeks as everyone else seems to be around here. I also struggled with how to deal with her not wanting to eat her noms, which already include Maya Angelou-approved organic fish and other gourmet entrees.  She never seemed to turn down leftover cat food in the other two bowls, though, and that gave me the idea. Three mornings ago, I started heating her refrigerated wet fud in the microwave for just a few seconds; it warmed it, but also moistened it. Our vet had noted that our similarly old (but far more evil) cat still had great teeth, and that her slowness in eating was probably because they produce less saliva as they get older.  Since I started this, Ebony hasn't left a morsel behind. And spring seems to have finally overcome, with her beloved dog park re-reopening for good this weekend.

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Wednesday brought no disappointment over a Mets loss of a lead from the night before, because they never had one. It did bring stress, because I could not find my wallet that morning. Turned out I'd dropped it into the empty box of a product purchased fairly late the night before and tossed it into our recycling tote. Fortunately, I discovered this before it went to the sorting center.

I also reviewed the formal notification I'd been tipped to several days earlier about the six hours of hell case I'd had a few weeks before. I pretty much had to write an email telling a client that he lost because he's, well, shall we say, difficult. I only pointed to one specific example of the difficulty in my email, and I have not heard back from him, lo these four days later, which suggests to me that he's pissed off over it, because, see above.

Another less difficult client had to be given some gentle advice about boundaries. They asked if I could identify their deadbeat debtor's bank account by following him from his office when he took his deposit to the bank.  I replied, "I try to be pretty thorough at this, but I'm not Magnum, PI and I don't tail people- particularly people who try to run over process servers. "

 

Yeah, that happened. He's pissed and is serving the contempt motion on the same guy this week.

This time, the Mets were behind late when I fell asleep, and they're the ones who rebounded to win the game late.  It portended good things for the next two days (even if only one of them was a win in two three games in Atlanta).

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Thursday was my road day, which began with the earlier client scheduled there, who emailed me moments after I left home to beg out and do it by phone. He showed up when I suggested that it wouldn't work out well that way.  I also won both hearings I had scheduled in Rochester that morning without even having to show up because neither party opposed me.  I then got the first of several of what I call "Kevin Bacon cases"- situations where I find myself impossibly connected to more than  one person, none of whom knows or should know the other.  In the first case, it was my latest futile foray into real estate, agreeing to handle a simple refi closing in Buffalo for a law school friend of mine based on Long Island.  This was the day I got an email identifying the borrower, and for all purposes, I was ready to swear that he was an existing client of mine.  (Turns out, not- the existing client thought it was his cousin, and others in my office pointed out that he spells his name slightly differently anyway.)

The next of those came yesterday. A client of mine wants to sue XYZ Dental. (Not their name, but in Buffalo you've heard of them). A search of their name in Albany reveals two different entities- an LLC and a PLLC. I ask the client which it is. They don't know and, in fact, they send me a contract with a third business name on it. I search on that and find that Entity Number Three was sued in 2015, and paid the resulting judgment... to a friend from high school who is also based on Long Island. He remembered the deadbeat and graciously offered to let me drop his name to scare the debtor.  The principal of the dental company turned out to be a guy named.... Bacon.

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Most of yesterday was for memories, though. One of my favorite coworkers in Buffalo is retiring after close to 20 years working, mostly on, for one of my officemate attorneys- much of that time spent down the hall from me in one office or another.  Her own official office threw her a party with pizza, cake and assorted refreshing beverages, but I knew I had to give her my own sendoff.  Two gifts resulted, from past stories and experiences.

Last year, one of her real estate clients called the office after their deal had closed. Lady was all upset because her pool cover had blown off and she didn't know what to do. Well of course you call your lawyer for that, right?  Ever since, C has been in charge of opening all the clients' pools- in their dreams, anyway. So I've known for weeks that her gift from me, whatever it was, would have to be appropriately packaged for that- and another friend, who has a pool, donated a chlorine-tablet bucket to the cause:



The gift within homaged another part of our office life. She and I are the main coffee drinkers in the office, and she almost always brought the milk in on Monday mornings so we wouldn't have to endure the nasty powdered stuff.  So I found a cow puppet at a beloved local toy store and gifted it to her (and, really, her grandkids) because we'd clearly worn out the one she already had at home:
 

Watch on YouTube

When we finished that celebration, I got to begin a new one. An email arrived with the early heralding of a court decision from the end of the previous week, where I sought to relieve a client of a mortgage to Wells Fargo which had accumulated to more than $300,000 in the more than ten years since they began their futile efforts to foreclose it. "Ten years" was the key, because in New York, the statute of limitations is six years and some stupidity and delay on the bank's part led to the entire debt being held outside that limitation period. My only clue in the email itself was just two words- motion granted- but the decision itself came in today's mail and makes me and my client very happy and even more vindicated.

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That got us to another Very Busy Saturday: another 90-minute workout, followed by an office run to collect the good news, and finally an afternoon spent downtown with a friend and friends of friend in a national "pub quiz" event held at our local Dinosaur Barbecue.  They usually test their skills at a Rochester venue, but it had filled its team quota early in the week and I was invited to be their sixth and final triviot for an eight-round contest based on Marvel Comics movies and other components of their universe.

It was marvelous fun, and the Dino is always worth a visit (although, for some reason, I've visited the one here far fewer times than the Rochester and even Syracuse ones).  Of the 64 questions posed, I contributed maybe three correct answers that nobody else knew; I perhaps confirmed a dozen others. But the stars were Lisa's high school-age kid and a friend of hers, who virtually studied for this thing on the drive in. We led after three rounds, and were tied for the lead after six, but our main competition- a team called  I Survived A Hydra Prison Camp And All I Got Was This Metal Arm! pulled ahead in the final round and beat us out for the biggish cash prize (probably less per person than we each spent on food and beer) by two points.  But we were second out of fourteen teams. Not bad for the first day.



(There are some with me and the other grownup in it, taken by others, but I haven't seen them posted yet. I also want to add in the names of some of the other teams, which were Ultronly inspired:)

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And that's a week. The sun finally came out, the temp did not dip below freezing, and we may be out of the winter woods.