Four story walk-up....

Or, something old, something new, something broken, something ewwwwww.

A friend of mine in Massachusetts is moving house, and her biggest challenge has been getting rid of a humongous sofa in her upper apartment.  I suggested a solution to her problem, but first I needed to tell the backstory of how I came up with it. Return with me to the thrilling days of the oughts....

I'd been hired to file a business bankruptcy for a company in Syracuse (nobody local would take the case- this should have been a warning). It leased a commercial building and had a number of pieces of heavy equipment that the building was literally built around. The business tanked, and its secured creditor got permission to recover the equipment, which on a good day at a typical bankruptcy auction might have netted 10 grand.

This creditor apparently expected that my out-of-business client would magically teleport the equipment to the other side of the walls. Finally, their lawyers got pissed, and wrote the judge an angry letter about how my client was defying the order awarding them possession and demanding the assistance of the US Marshals. I had no dog in this fight anymore, so I watched it all go by as I got ready to head out of town for a vacation.

Then my email went BOOM. The judge in the Syracuse case gave them exactly what they asked for- an order TO the US Marshals to recover their equipment with cranes and blowtorches, which resulted in a bill FROM the US Marshals to the creditor for the roughly $50,000 this fool's errand was estimated to cost them. The emails were the creditor BEGGING the then-other Bankruptcy Judge in New York Northern, sitting in Albany, to vacate the crane-and-blowtorch order (the assigned judge, like me, was on vacation). And eventually, he did- but not without a good amount of schadenfreude on my part.

And so, my advice today to Izzy? If all else fails, sprinkle some weed in the thing. Maybe someone will call the US Marshals, who always get their heavy equipment.

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In newer work-related clusters, I made a call yesterday which explained the snafu over my misbegotten court (non-)appearance the night before:

Even before I sent my appearance in to the court clerk, they had already caught the error of the trooper's ways: they sent a letter right out to my client telling him that the correct date was the night before the one on the ticket.

He never told me.   Instead, he told them his attorney was someone named Doug Stiller. Or at least that's what they took down: it appears Doug does exist, but I’ve never met him, and he would have no idea who I (or “my” client) might be. Amazingly, any further correspondence with the new date never got to me.

Fortunately, no bench warrants were issued. So now it’s off for a month until August 20th. Which is, yes, a Tuesday.

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I found that out before starting a relatively productive Rochester day yesterday- meeting two new clients, getting formally retained by a third and more-or-less connecting with three current ones for things they needed.  This morning, I had no travel plans, other than to the Mercedes dealer, for it was finally the day to find out why my check engine light was on.  This resulted in a $160 car wash:P

The selling dealer, who no longer sells, is perhaps my least favorite place on earth.  The car is now out of warranty, and everybody at the dealer treats us like crap when we go in with this tiny little car, so before going there, I took it to our longtime mechanic. Their computer read the codes, and could tell generally what they were, but not what exact part was causing it.

So hi ho, hi ho, it's back to Benz we go. They hit you for $150 plus tax just to tell you that. And "that" turns out to be a pump which, with their labor, runs over a grand. Worse, the part is not even in stock. But they did wash the car before returning it to me, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. Also, the idiot light is off- at least for now.

I paid the tribute and left the work order open. They showed me the specifics of what part and how much, but I had to ask them to give me that- you know, so I can take it back to my mechanic and see if he can do it for maybe a fewer body parts than the arm and leg I was just quoted. Dude grumbled and tore off the "customer copy" of the parts quote.

At this point, I will likely wait until closer to inspection time to revisit this- just to be sure there aren't any OTHER codes that are going to keep a sticker off the thing. And there's always the Magliazzi approach to solving the check engine light problem:


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And finally, an update on the indoor wildlife:

Claude, our resident bathroom spider, would appear to be Claudine. Eleanor spotted what looked to be a well-organized set of leetle dots round the webbing. I went to photograph it and saw nothing- either we were wrong, and Claude was simply OCD about arranging his food earlier in the day, or Claudine had a different approach to parenting than the one we took. But with proper lighting, the "food" does indeed look to be "brood:"

 

 

There's got to be an exam question in this: "Assume you swallow eight spiders a year in your sleep. How many nights will you lie awake staring at the ceiling before none of these baby spiders will be able to leave on a train for Chicago going 100 mph?"

(At least one online friend from Chicago objected to that. She didn't care if Claudine was on a mission from God.)