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Forward....into the Past!
May. 26th, 2022 10:53 amRight. After taking several thousand words over four days to recap a single Day in the Life, I am now going to try compressing the last four days into a single post.
Sunday- the Good.
Once I was more or less sentient, and Eleanor and I worked through the feels of the whole Night Before (stress for me, worry for her), we got on with a very productive day. There was one house project she really wanted to make progress on, or rather, a just outside-the-house project.
In the over 16 years since I've practiced law on my own, the first nine without any permanent physical office, I've been in charge of my own storage, and the only place to put closed files has been at home. There's one two-drawer lateral file cabinet in this office that Eleanor bought for me early on in her furniture store selling days, but the rest just gradually hodgepodged into a collection of freecycled old file drawers found at neighbors' curbs, some Bigass™ Rubbermaid totes I scored from my other office, but mostly empty cardboard boxes used for copier paper. Lots and lots and lots of them.
Fun lawyer fact: it's rare to have to retain a paper file forever, but there are some that require it. Anything containing electronically filed documents usually has to be kept for 5-7 years after the case closes, because it holds the original-signature papers. Anything where malpractice could ever be raised has to hang for at least the time we could be sued, which is usually three years after any representation of the client ends. If all else fails, go with seven years, as in breaking a mirror bad luck.
Fun Time Lord fact: it's 2022. I have paper files going back to 2006 and a few from even before that I wound up with after I left my last fulltime firm. You do the math. A ton of stuff can be tossed. And a good portion of it now has been.
Months ago after retiring, Eleanor made a project of building a set of shelves in our cellar, to transfer the bulk of the flotsam in the garage to. This made sense, in that the files would now be less likely to be broken into, far less likely to get snow and rain crap from a car parked next to (and occasionally on) them, and would be higher up than floor level which would be a blessing to my knees and eyesight trying to find things. Most of the "recently closed" files were already down there, but two of the curbcycled file cabinets, a falling-apart faux wood cabinet from Emily's old room, one of the totes, and a half dozen copier boxes still remained out there with no shelf space downstairs to move them to.
No matter. It was time to get movin'. First, though, I kept a promise, and did a 90 minute workout on four hours interrupted sleep. (Ours are usually 60 minutes tops.) Speaking of Tops, it was a fundraiser that one of the gym trainers organized in the face of the previous weekend's grocery store massacre, to support inner city kids looking to get exercise through bicycling:
Colored Girls Bike Too is a “Cycling org advocating for mobility Justice and liberation in marginalized comm & promotes healing of Black/of color women and GBNfolks by bike.” We’re choosing to support Colored Girls Bike Too because they’re working to build a community & safe place for women to use the bike as a way to travel, heal, liberate and restore the community. We will be hosting a 90 minute donation class at the Blvd location, Sunday May 22nd at 10:45am. 1551 Niagara Falls Blvd. Any donation is welcome, you do not need to take the class to donate.
Well, I did already donate, but I needed to clear my head from the events of the previous night, so I hung in for the full 90. Then I did another 90, times a few, moving boxes. (I'd already finished mowing the whole lawn not mowed on Friday even before the class.) Some went up- to an attic space I reserve for the "mostly dead but barely alive" files. Some went down- to a staging area until the new shelves go up or to space made by clearing out some of the "really dead" files I'd stupidly hauled down cellar. Those, along with numerous other "really dead" ones, went into Eleanor's trunk, and two days later went into the Rochester office's shredding cabinets. For the first time in several forevers, there are no. Files. AT ALL in the damn garage.
It also reaffirmed my confidence that my cognition problems are not spilling into my higher-level professional functions. At least not yet. Because as I handled hundreds of files of largely ancient vintage, I remembered the who's and what's and whether I had to keep or could pitch. I even found two valuable items in one of them: title searches to two properties in the Buffalo area. One, I remembered the who and all: I closed a purchase for a nice older Buffalo area couple back in 2000 and still had their abstract of title and survey in the file. We generally send those back to the buyers these days right after they close, but back then lawyers tended to hang onto them to enhance their chances of representing the buyer when they sold. I hadn't heard from them in all these years despite me retaining the local phone number and email from back then through my various moves. Sadly, the husband passed away a few years after the deal. I tracked down the lawyer who represents the estate, who I vaguely remember from law school, and sent the search and survey off to her yesterday. The other one? Not a clue. I vaguely remember a client being in property tax trouble 20 odd years ago. I'm just going to send it to the property address. Those documents are of no use to me but would cost a seller hundreds of dollars and weeks of time to replace, so I can still do good things even if I have no idea who I'm doing them for.
----
Monday- the Bad I didn't find out about until yesterday.
It's a fairly quiet workweek with the holiday weekend coming up. No court, my only appointment before today was a cleaning at my dentist in Rochester which went fine. It's been mostly catchup, plus the occasional mailing out of longlost title searches and nagging people to finalize shit I've been on them to finalize for weeks. One was for a deal I'm actually closing, an offshoot of some other work for the guy. I overnighted him his documents to sign on Friday, he got them Saturday, but I never heard from him until I was home Monday night. That meant I needed to retrieve his file from my office, since I had teeth on Tuesday out of town. Remember also, I have no key to my office yet. But no biggie, I thought: one of my co-worker's paralegals comes in early, so I was here around 8:30. She wasn't. I ran errands and waited for someone to arrive after 9, and went about a day of paperwork and teeth cleaning and a workout and finally home at the usual time.
It wasn't until yesterday morning that I found out why I couldn't get in at 8:30. That paralegal, and one other on their staff, had tested positive for COVID, our early arriver with symptoms. My friend and fellow attorney was down two employees in the last week of a very busy month. She and her one safe staffer were fine, but I found the need to be sure, so I sent out my two mailpieces and went home to run one of the tests I'd fortunately picked up from Uncle Joe a few months ago.
And,.... an hour or so later after unwrapping and reading tiny type and upnosing and dropping and shaking and waiting.....
::drumroll::
That's negative. A line on the T is what you don't want.
It's frightening that this is still an issue after anyone can walk in anywhere and get vaccinated and boosted with no wait and no cost. Shit happens, I know, and it's not the people involved specifically as much as it's the herd in general. They'll get a tetanus shot if they step on a nail (or they'll get lockjaw, I know, MOM!;), and they'll follow the schedule for childhood immunizations, but since an idiot turned public health into a political position, I was literally two millimeters away from having to shut my practice down for two weeks.
----
The rest of Tuesday and the Ugly news.
Lots of people off in the other office this week for vacation rather than vaccination reasons, so I wasn't in there long. It was mostly to stuff dead things into their shredding cabinets. I got in and out of the dentist's chair on schedule and started my drive home in time to get in a more typical 60-minute gym class. But again, my heart was heavy by my arrival time, and I found out about it through a sports program, of all things.
The afternoon talk show on Buffalo's longtime AM station, now devoted to that format, is celebrating 100 years on the air; they've been all sports for about the last 20. I've followed one of the hosts, Mike Schopp, since he started on a Rochester afternoon radio program in the 90s. He then moved here, to a "sports talk for smart people" format on a dear-departed FM voice I've been writing about here since some of my earliest blogging days. Their AM competitor then poached him and put him on briefly with a loudmouthed former Bills coach, which we referred to as "Schopp and the Dope." But what finally stuck was a much better partnership between Mike and Chris Parker, another voice who's been on various Buffalo sports shows since the 90s, who goes by the nom de sportsball of The Bulldog. I’ve met him, at a Bisons game at Sahlen and a concert or two at Sportsmens, but I try to limit my celebrity stalking to Jamestown bands so we haven't connected on social media.
Driving home late Tuesday, it was Chris who conveyed news of the latest schoolchild massacre in Texas to me. He was near speechless and crying. Not things that they encourage in broadcast school. When I heard the rest of the story, I understood. So many, so young, and so soon after.
A minute later? He struggled back into Bulldog mode, going on about Mike’s workouts. That’s professionalism.
I posted my thanks to him through a mutual friend in radio, and got this comment back in response:
Thank you Ray. I appreciate this a great deal. Best to you and yours.
Then, in my travels for work at the end of the day yesterday, I tuned in their (twisted) sister station to get a traffic report when the 90 backed up on me. It's the former home of Limbaugh and now carries local rightwingers in the afternoon time slot. My God. I was in complete brain pain listening to the ammosexuals calling into WBEN and whining about Joe or Kathy trying to take away their fucking Uzis and body armor. “But background checks are soooooo harrrrrd! And there are so many agencies to check, so they’ll never get them done in time!”
OF COURSE IT’S HARD! Because the Nuts Running America have blocked every effort to modernize or computerize recordkeeping and integration of agency records. It’s all on paper in a huge warehouse in Virginia someplace, and can't be shared in any meaningful way. If these guys cared a fraction for actual living, loving, vibrant little kids, rather than the blastocysts the size of your fingernail they’re determined to pound out, they’d be spending their time a lot more wisely.
Maybe someone will start a fundraiser for some of the living kids traumatized by this latest gunnuttery. It's at least better than more of their meaningless thoughts and prayers:P
----
There. All caught up. Except for the 10:53 Stupid Joke of the Day about our adventures this morning:
Fun with computers, May 26 edition.
Ray is teaching Mrs. Ray how to use a new-to-her program on her older laptop.
Said laptop is seized and the icon for the program won't maximize.
SHE intuits that Task Manager might help.
It does.
It reveals that iTunes is "not responding" and gumming up the works (we close it), AND that the Windows Defender anti-malware clusterproggie is running and clogging about two-thirds of her RAM (you can't close it).
I make some remarks about death in fires.
Her: "It's okay, honey. I'm a Buddhist, I can cope."
Me: "Ah. The noble truth that life is suffering."
"Clearly, the Buddha worked in IT."
(We got it working.)
Sunday- the Good.
Once I was more or less sentient, and Eleanor and I worked through the feels of the whole Night Before (stress for me, worry for her), we got on with a very productive day. There was one house project she really wanted to make progress on, or rather, a just outside-the-house project.
In the over 16 years since I've practiced law on my own, the first nine without any permanent physical office, I've been in charge of my own storage, and the only place to put closed files has been at home. There's one two-drawer lateral file cabinet in this office that Eleanor bought for me early on in her furniture store selling days, but the rest just gradually hodgepodged into a collection of freecycled old file drawers found at neighbors' curbs, some Bigass™ Rubbermaid totes I scored from my other office, but mostly empty cardboard boxes used for copier paper. Lots and lots and lots of them.
Fun lawyer fact: it's rare to have to retain a paper file forever, but there are some that require it. Anything containing electronically filed documents usually has to be kept for 5-7 years after the case closes, because it holds the original-signature papers. Anything where malpractice could ever be raised has to hang for at least the time we could be sued, which is usually three years after any representation of the client ends. If all else fails, go with seven years, as in breaking a mirror bad luck.
Fun Time Lord fact: it's 2022. I have paper files going back to 2006 and a few from even before that I wound up with after I left my last fulltime firm. You do the math. A ton of stuff can be tossed. And a good portion of it now has been.
Months ago after retiring, Eleanor made a project of building a set of shelves in our cellar, to transfer the bulk of the flotsam in the garage to. This made sense, in that the files would now be less likely to be broken into, far less likely to get snow and rain crap from a car parked next to (and occasionally on) them, and would be higher up than floor level which would be a blessing to my knees and eyesight trying to find things. Most of the "recently closed" files were already down there, but two of the curbcycled file cabinets, a falling-apart faux wood cabinet from Emily's old room, one of the totes, and a half dozen copier boxes still remained out there with no shelf space downstairs to move them to.
No matter. It was time to get movin'. First, though, I kept a promise, and did a 90 minute workout on four hours interrupted sleep. (Ours are usually 60 minutes tops.) Speaking of Tops, it was a fundraiser that one of the gym trainers organized in the face of the previous weekend's grocery store massacre, to support inner city kids looking to get exercise through bicycling:
Colored Girls Bike Too is a “Cycling org advocating for mobility Justice and liberation in marginalized comm & promotes healing of Black/of color women and GBNfolks by bike.” We’re choosing to support Colored Girls Bike Too because they’re working to build a community & safe place for women to use the bike as a way to travel, heal, liberate and restore the community. We will be hosting a 90 minute donation class at the Blvd location, Sunday May 22nd at 10:45am. 1551 Niagara Falls Blvd. Any donation is welcome, you do not need to take the class to donate.
Well, I did already donate, but I needed to clear my head from the events of the previous night, so I hung in for the full 90. Then I did another 90, times a few, moving boxes. (I'd already finished mowing the whole lawn not mowed on Friday even before the class.) Some went up- to an attic space I reserve for the "mostly dead but barely alive" files. Some went down- to a staging area until the new shelves go up or to space made by clearing out some of the "really dead" files I'd stupidly hauled down cellar. Those, along with numerous other "really dead" ones, went into Eleanor's trunk, and two days later went into the Rochester office's shredding cabinets. For the first time in several forevers, there are no. Files. AT ALL in the damn garage.
It also reaffirmed my confidence that my cognition problems are not spilling into my higher-level professional functions. At least not yet. Because as I handled hundreds of files of largely ancient vintage, I remembered the who's and what's and whether I had to keep or could pitch. I even found two valuable items in one of them: title searches to two properties in the Buffalo area. One, I remembered the who and all: I closed a purchase for a nice older Buffalo area couple back in 2000 and still had their abstract of title and survey in the file. We generally send those back to the buyers these days right after they close, but back then lawyers tended to hang onto them to enhance their chances of representing the buyer when they sold. I hadn't heard from them in all these years despite me retaining the local phone number and email from back then through my various moves. Sadly, the husband passed away a few years after the deal. I tracked down the lawyer who represents the estate, who I vaguely remember from law school, and sent the search and survey off to her yesterday. The other one? Not a clue. I vaguely remember a client being in property tax trouble 20 odd years ago. I'm just going to send it to the property address. Those documents are of no use to me but would cost a seller hundreds of dollars and weeks of time to replace, so I can still do good things even if I have no idea who I'm doing them for.
----
Monday- the Bad I didn't find out about until yesterday.
It's a fairly quiet workweek with the holiday weekend coming up. No court, my only appointment before today was a cleaning at my dentist in Rochester which went fine. It's been mostly catchup, plus the occasional mailing out of longlost title searches and nagging people to finalize shit I've been on them to finalize for weeks. One was for a deal I'm actually closing, an offshoot of some other work for the guy. I overnighted him his documents to sign on Friday, he got them Saturday, but I never heard from him until I was home Monday night. That meant I needed to retrieve his file from my office, since I had teeth on Tuesday out of town. Remember also, I have no key to my office yet. But no biggie, I thought: one of my co-worker's paralegals comes in early, so I was here around 8:30. She wasn't. I ran errands and waited for someone to arrive after 9, and went about a day of paperwork and teeth cleaning and a workout and finally home at the usual time.
It wasn't until yesterday morning that I found out why I couldn't get in at 8:30. That paralegal, and one other on their staff, had tested positive for COVID, our early arriver with symptoms. My friend and fellow attorney was down two employees in the last week of a very busy month. She and her one safe staffer were fine, but I found the need to be sure, so I sent out my two mailpieces and went home to run one of the tests I'd fortunately picked up from Uncle Joe a few months ago.
And,.... an hour or so later after unwrapping and reading tiny type and upnosing and dropping and shaking and waiting.....
::drumroll::
That's negative. A line on the T is what you don't want.
It's frightening that this is still an issue after anyone can walk in anywhere and get vaccinated and boosted with no wait and no cost. Shit happens, I know, and it's not the people involved specifically as much as it's the herd in general. They'll get a tetanus shot if they step on a nail (or they'll get lockjaw, I know, MOM!;), and they'll follow the schedule for childhood immunizations, but since an idiot turned public health into a political position, I was literally two millimeters away from having to shut my practice down for two weeks.
----
The rest of Tuesday and the Ugly news.
Lots of people off in the other office this week for vacation rather than vaccination reasons, so I wasn't in there long. It was mostly to stuff dead things into their shredding cabinets. I got in and out of the dentist's chair on schedule and started my drive home in time to get in a more typical 60-minute gym class. But again, my heart was heavy by my arrival time, and I found out about it through a sports program, of all things.
The afternoon talk show on Buffalo's longtime AM station, now devoted to that format, is celebrating 100 years on the air; they've been all sports for about the last 20. I've followed one of the hosts, Mike Schopp, since he started on a Rochester afternoon radio program in the 90s. He then moved here, to a "sports talk for smart people" format on a dear-departed FM voice I've been writing about here since some of my earliest blogging days. Their AM competitor then poached him and put him on briefly with a loudmouthed former Bills coach, which we referred to as "Schopp and the Dope." But what finally stuck was a much better partnership between Mike and Chris Parker, another voice who's been on various Buffalo sports shows since the 90s, who goes by the nom de sportsball of The Bulldog. I’ve met him, at a Bisons game at Sahlen and a concert or two at Sportsmens, but I try to limit my celebrity stalking to Jamestown bands so we haven't connected on social media.
Driving home late Tuesday, it was Chris who conveyed news of the latest schoolchild massacre in Texas to me. He was near speechless and crying. Not things that they encourage in broadcast school. When I heard the rest of the story, I understood. So many, so young, and so soon after.
A minute later? He struggled back into Bulldog mode, going on about Mike’s workouts. That’s professionalism.
I posted my thanks to him through a mutual friend in radio, and got this comment back in response:
Thank you Ray. I appreciate this a great deal. Best to you and yours.
Then, in my travels for work at the end of the day yesterday, I tuned in their (twisted) sister station to get a traffic report when the 90 backed up on me. It's the former home of Limbaugh and now carries local rightwingers in the afternoon time slot. My God. I was in complete brain pain listening to the ammosexuals calling into WBEN and whining about Joe or Kathy trying to take away their fucking Uzis and body armor. “But background checks are soooooo harrrrrd! And there are so many agencies to check, so they’ll never get them done in time!”
OF COURSE IT’S HARD! Because the Nuts Running America have blocked every effort to modernize or computerize recordkeeping and integration of agency records. It’s all on paper in a huge warehouse in Virginia someplace, and can't be shared in any meaningful way. If these guys cared a fraction for actual living, loving, vibrant little kids, rather than the blastocysts the size of your fingernail they’re determined to pound out, they’d be spending their time a lot more wisely.
Maybe someone will start a fundraiser for some of the living kids traumatized by this latest gunnuttery. It's at least better than more of their meaningless thoughts and prayers:P
----
There. All caught up. Except for the 10:53 Stupid Joke of the Day about our adventures this morning:
Fun with computers, May 26 edition.
Ray is teaching Mrs. Ray how to use a new-to-her program on her older laptop.
Said laptop is seized and the icon for the program won't maximize.
SHE intuits that Task Manager might help.
It does.
It reveals that iTunes is "not responding" and gumming up the works (we close it), AND that the Windows Defender anti-malware clusterproggie is running and clogging about two-thirds of her RAM (you can't close it).
I make some remarks about death in fires.
Her: "It's okay, honey. I'm a Buddhist, I can cope."
Me: "Ah. The noble truth that life is suffering."
"Clearly, the Buddha worked in IT."
(We got it working.)