captainsblog | Aug. 31st, 2023

I began this while out walking the dog on Wednesday night. I usually do that in the morning but I had to be in early for a client's bankruptcy hearing by phone. That leads to a couple of the moments worth mentioning..

There was one case called ahead of the one I was waiting on, and it was a doozy. The debtor is a physician, probably older than me, who lives in a much swankier section of Amherst than we do. He apparently went quite a few years without bothering to pay his taxes- income or property- and the county eventually got around to foreclosing on the house, auctioning it off at a public sale not quite a year ago. He filed a bankruptcy shortly after the auction. The general rule is that bankruptcy law considers such sales to be final if the hammer has fallen at the auction before the case is filed in Bankruptcy Court. Some municipalities in New York got a little greedy with the process, trying to accelerate the transfer of title so they can pocket any surplus value bid at the auction over what they're owed in taxes. There is a recent federal appellate case suggesting there might be some hope in some cases, but I don’t think anything ever came of it in this one, so the good doctor has just thrown his hands up and turn his assets over for liquidation.

(His assets, Siri, not his ass.)

None of this had anything to do with me or any client of mine that I knew of, but I did hear them report that the foreclosing court had recently turned over a substantial amount of “surplus money“ to be distributed. Since I was just waiting anyway, I decided to look up the property record and see if I knew anybody that might have a possible claim to that money. Whadya know?, I did. I wouldn’t call him a friend, but I’ve known this one lawyer for well over 30 years. He’s generally been decent as a colleague or an occasional opponent; and I knew, from waiting around on another hearing with the bankruptcy judge two days earlier, that he had been out on medical leave for quite some time and was just getting back to work. I also knew, from another recent appearance, that his small suburban firm had just merged with one of the larger downtown shops. So after my hearing, which went mostly fine, I emailed Dan to let him know that he might have some money coming out of this other proceeding that I had just been a bystander on. He was very appreciative of me giving him a heads up, and even though I won’t see anything other than a thank you out of there, I like to think that someone out there will do the same thing for me someday if it becomes necessary.

The calls that I was listening to from or about Dan were part of the system that radically changed three years ago and is starting to change again. Since COVID, 99 percent of my bankruptcy court appearances have been by phone. I have not set foot even once in a bankruptcy courtroom in Rochester, where I probably have still made the most appearances over my career. The court system itself handles the appearances with judges through one phone number; the Justice Department arranges the separate hearings between the client and their bankruptcy trustee. Different numbers, codes, but basically the same procedure: call a number, enter a code or two, MUTE YOUR FUCKING PHONE UNTIL YOUR CASE IS CALLED.

The court side of the system is still that way for now, but the DOJ is transitioning to Zoom for the hearings between debtors and trustees. I just got a flyer about an informational meeting about the new program: how to get the needed software, access the online meetings, how to mute your fucking SCREEN etc.

The first session to learn about Zoom, which I just signed up for, was organized by a US trustee dude out of Rochester and will be on September 26.

On Teams.

Way to show confidence in your platform, guys!

——

That date, coincidentally, is our anniversary, so I will have to figure out an appropriate gift for the love of my life these past 36 years. In other words, what power tool will it be this time. Eleanor has already gotten plenty of use out of the new chainsaw I got her last weekend. She proceeded, over the last several days, to fill five more yard size trash cans with the cuttings and scrapings from various annoyances in mostly the back yard:

Add those to the five full cans we put out on each of the two Thursday mornings they started paving our street, the five refilled cans that went out last Thursday after they finished that job, and you get at least 20 cans of crap that are no longer on our property. Four out of five landscapers surveyed say that’s a lot.

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As if THAT 20 wasn’t enough:

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I decided to make the effort at the gym this month to participate in a month long quote marathon challenge. The goal is to accumulate the equivalent of a 26.2 mile marathon, or the 13.1 “half” version of that, between the first and 31st of the month. I had just enough motivation ::waits for Siri to autocorrect that to “insanity”:: to pick the 13.1 version, which would’ve meant, over the usual eight classes I taken a month, a bit over 1.6 miles in a 22 minute typical interval. That is far short of a Roger Bannister speed record, but I had been typically hitting just over a mile in previous sessions.

Somehow, I managed to hit the 13.1 threshold for a half marathon over a week ago. I toyed briefly with hitting the full over the five classes I then had left. Very briefly. The only way to have done it would’ve been if they had added a few 90 minute specialty classes with more minutes on the treadmill, and while they did have one of those, it was in a format where I didn’t get to add much more on the total than I do in a usual 60.

But motivation is a funny thing. (So is insanity, I hear you cry.) I just kept going toward Nothing in Particular, and noticed that my total each day was getting closer to a "two miles in 22 minute" mark. That's something I had never hit before. I've now hit it twice, and by the time I ended and posted this at the end of the 31st, I got it past 20 miles. That took 31 days, 11 sessions, with seven different coaches in four different locations, ending this afternoon near my Rochester office where I'd been all day. The last time I traversed 20 miles all at once? Well over 45 years ago, a March of Dimes walkathon that began and ended in East Meadow's Eisenhower Park and sent us through Levittown, Bethpage, Westbury and finally down Carman Avenue past our high school to the point and place of beginning. I was a lot less creaky then, but proud tonight that, even though it took longer in days, I hit the same thing in miles.

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Moving on, with a couple of random sillies:

We're trying to do a better job of keeping in touch with each other when I'm out of the house extensively, whether for work or movie marathons or whatever. Two of those moments intersected almost simultaneously today, with each seeing a bumper stickery thing we found funny enough to share.

Hers, to me:

And then vice to versa:

Hey, I didn't die going 20 miles in 11 classes, so I think the cow's safe, as well:)

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And finally, a flashback to the poetry of recent weeks:

I mentioned from the weekend that our poetry group had a tent set up throughout the recent Elmwood festival, to sell the wares of some participants-

- but also to encourage more creativity, with a Group Poem being created on site by anyone who cared to add a line or five:

Some of those words were mine. A few of them wound up in a published version of the entire poem that appeared in an online Buffalo arts site this week.

I'm a published poet! Okay, a published semi-couplet! Still!