Not very appealing. Not exactly working. Still kinda deciding.

When we last left Our Hero, he was midway through the first of three straight workdays with early and annoying court appearances.  The second, like the first, took way longer to get to than it did to get through my part of.  Monday, I was not at the end of the calendar, but the cases before mine took interminably long, with the judge, who I genuinely like, uttering the only words I do not like to hear coming from him: I find this interesting. Translation: this is gonna take awhile.

On Tuesday, on the other hand, I was at the end of the calendar.  This was one of my very occasional forays into appellate practice, and has been, by far, the strangest of them I've ever done.  I was brought into a New York State court case late in the game not quite two years ago, to provide extra clarification about a persnickety aspect of Chapter 11 bankruptcy practice that was relevant to my client's entitlement to be paid.  The original argument before the lower court judge was around this time last year. I was the last case on the calendar, and the other attorney didn't show up. We lost anyway- and on weird grounds. The judge's written decision referred to a previous decision in the case which, he now said, told us X.  It did not. Not even close. So we appealed. This starts an arduous process of reprinting previous documents in fancy colored bound volumes, briefing the issues in writing, replying to your opponent's brief and then finally doing Real Life Moot Court and arguing your points to a panel of five judges who are, increasingly, less old than you are.

Few problems here. My opponent refused to sign off on "stipulating the record," a routine and courteous thing you just do, win or lose, to expedite getting an appeal heard on its merits.  That required me to go back to the original judge and waste more time and money having HIM do it.  Then, file the papers and wait for the response. No response.  I've never had an unopposed state court appeal before; I did at least once in federal court, got a bankruptcy judge overruled, and to this day he mocks me (in a good-natured way) for only winning because nobody was there to argue HIS side.

You still get to argue if there's no response; but you don't just win by default, either. And this court is the height of haughty when it comes to scheduling. They send a Term Notice weeks before the argument. It says, in essence: Your case will be heard during the May Term, which is May 14-24. You have X days to tell us of any conflicting dates. Otherwise, show up on the day we tell you.  Well. Most of my practice, in the legal equivalent of meatball surgery, doesn't clean up so good. My typical turnarounds for dates popping up is 8 to 40 days, and most are closer to 8 than they are to 40.  So at the time, I had no dates to tell them about. But in mid-April, I got some.  By then, the appellate court had already scheduled my argument for this past Tuesday- but they never notified me. Because apparently, once you get that Term Notice, you are supposed to keep your calendar completely clear for the entire two weeks, or go ADD on them and check their site daily, to find out what your day is.  Instead, and with gracious opponents, I adjourned everything else- and showed up, bright and shiny, to argue against nobody.

Now comes the worst part: all'yall could have watched. In fact, you still can. (I am so glad I did not realise this until after it was over. This client, a very nice guy, was also very into it, and I'm sure would have been critiquing every point.)

There's the usual range of advocacy before you get to me at the end of the line. A few cases before me, a pro se appellant had to be talked through the most basic of points about where to stand, what to say and how to use his time- but he ultimately did a decent job of it. After that came a case which was populating most of the audience section: an appeal of a rule on a same-sex-marriage matrimonial issue which everybody found interesting.  Then they all cleared out, the next few cases cleared up quickly, and finally it was just me and the five judges.

I got one question. All day, this had been more a Warm than a Hot Bench, but at least one before me went uninterrupted. I answered it best I could- it was either a leading question supporting our argument or a trap, not sure which still- went back to my notes, and at just about the stroke of noon, the presiding judge cut me off, asked if I had anything further, and they all went to lunch. 

Decisions come out next month.  Betting is now legal, so I'd go with Ray minus the points.

----

Speaking of math,....

Wednesday's court wasn't as long, but was far more annoying for various reasons. No matter. I had a more time-consuming and annoying issue on my hands.  Earlier in the week, Microsoft pushed through a Big Ole Update (not to be confused with a Big OLE Update) of Windows 10. I even had the smarts to shut everything down and restart before I left for court Monday morning. Turned it on, started working- it shut everything down again mid-work and said, okay, NOW it's downloaded, let's git installin!  Everything was copacetic until I opened my first spreadsheet in Excel 2003.

Go. Mock. Hello. My name is Ray, and I am a Luddite.  But I have my reasons. Office 2003 is the last real descendant of the original versions of Microsoft products that respect old farts like me and our muscle memory of DOS and keyboard commands.

Here's what a blank 2003 page looks like:

 

Not very interesting, I know- but just enough functionality at the top to get done what I need.  Now see the sheet, how big it's grown, as of 2007 and I presume every version since:



Bizzy bizzy bizzy, all that shiz at the top. Most of which I don't know how to use and wouldn't have any use for if I did. So I've stayed with my trusty, if unsupported, old version through at least 3 laptops and jumps from Vista to 7 to 8 to 8ish to 10.  Eleanor uses it, too.

So imagine my surprise when, on return from that first day of court, I entered a number in blahblah.xls and blahblah.xls said, BOOP! and closed the proggie.  Must be a glitch in the file, right? I opened another. BOOP! I tried copying blahblah into blahblah(copy 1) to see if the computer liked that any better. Nope. When I got home, I accessed blahblah (it's on the cloud) from the Frankenputer in the next room that still runs Windows 8ish- and it worked fine.  Thus, the problem was clearly something delivered in that update that was making old programs not work.

By Tuesday, various Microsoft discussion boards had identified this as a Known Issue, and this last update as the cause- bringing together others like me who keep the old around because, reasons. The one I most identified with (although I did not write it):

 

The "LibreOffice" he mentions was the obvious workaround. AKA "Open Office," it's a free suite of productivity programs which duplicate and work with files generated in MS products like Excel. I've used it before, and with a quick download, by Wednesday night I had access to and ability to use all my spreadsheets again.  But I'm stubborn and stupid, and kept checking to see if a subsequent update would fix what ver. 1803 hath torn asunder.  Wednesday's didn't. Apparently another arrived Thursday that didn't. But somehow, when I got to Rochester yesterday morning and turned my laptop on, everything was shut down except Chrome, which is a sign of either a bad crash or yet another update.  It appears to have been the latter- and it appears that the latter finally fixed the broken Windows on the property and I have all my spreadsheets working in a piece of software that is almost old enough to legally drive.

Ain't life good?

----

It's seemed that way, computing aside, for the past couple of days. I was really dragging it early in the week. Some was the stress from those three straight days- some might have been a crazy effort to do four difficult OTF workouts in six (five, in my case) days just to get a towel and a stinkin t-shirt.  But I knew some of it was, still, Dog.  I see my black briefcase on the love seat in here and swear it's Ebony. There are dogs in dreams just about every night. And the hardest is it coming at this time of year. If she'd passed in mid-February- especially THIS frigid mid-February- when dogwalkers are few and far between, it might have been easier to get over.  But they're everywhere.  On the drive to work, all over the neighborhood after I get home- there's even a freaking grooming salon next to my Rochester office with pups coming and going throughout the day.

Still, I haven't said anything. I remembered how it went down, and how hard the loss was for Eleanor. Yesterday morning, though, she said it: she's been thinking it, too. And Pepper remains unclaimed.  It took some convincing of her owner Emilee (how she spells it, and how we now distinguish her from our Emily by putting the emPHAYsis on the last sylLABle), but she is going to bring her over sometime over the weekend to see how dog and cats interact.  It's still not decided- but the biggest votes now come with four paws each.