"Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up drinking...."

That's the only one I ever had among the various bad habits Lloyd Bridges talked about giving up in Airplane!-



- and unlike Captain McCroskey, I haven't fallen off my not-drinking wagon, which I passed my second anniversary of riding back on Halloween. 

I did, however, have a beer this week.  Just not a literal one.  In the Learned League trivia competition I've returned to this week, getting all six answers correct is referred to as a "beer," as in a "six-pack." The questions are usually tough enough that even eking out one or two of the six can seem like an accomplishment. On Wednesday morning, following all the chasing after of assorted Whos in Whoville, I sat down with breakfast and my screen of six questions.   A sports/television one in my 70s wheelhouse; a sciency one I actually remembered the answer to from ninth grade; a US political history one I'm pretty geeky about; a geography question mixing South Pacific and Northern Britain places I caught the clue for; a math one I had burned into my brain in eighth grade; and naming just one of the three US states that elected one of the recently failed Republican candidates for Speaker, for which I remembered Gym Jordan being from Ohio.

Boom. This Bud's for you.  I knew I'd gotten all six correct even before the scoring early the next morning, wondering only if I'd get credit for answering "Caledonia" when " New Caledonia" was the full correct answer but "New" was given as part of the name in the question. (I did.) Even more surprising was after three rounds of the 25-match competition, I was alone in first place among the 20 players in my group. I don't think I've ever been in first beyond perhaps part of a 10-way tie after the first day- and I have every expectation that my luck will run out and I'll be back in the mediocre middle of the pack or, as I was last time, hanging on by my fingernails to not fall into the bottom tier that gets "relegated" to a dumber group of trivia players the following season.

Wednesday's "beer" was only my fifth sweep of the six-question board in over 475 games played, most of them falling months or even years apart. It turned out to be nothing of a harbinger for good, though, because the ensuing workday turned out to be a cluster of fuck, and when I tried to revel in my gaming glory by playing that nexty morning's six questions, I could have turned them into my first-ever occurrence of two consecutive beers.

That didn't happen, but the work fail of Wednesday more or less resolved itself.

Taking those in  order.

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Wednesday morning brought six more questions. Three of them, I knew, though it took longer than I would have liked to remember the name of a 1940s baseball player and I wasn't 100% sure of a theater question  but I was right.  Ah, but the other three. Trust your first impression, they say- and on this one-

According to a song written by Merle Travis and recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955, you load 16 tons, what do you get?

- my first impression was Of COURSE it's "ANOTHER DAY OLDER AND DEEPER IN DEBT." Which I duly typed in, but then I remembered using that lyric on any number of birthday greetings over the years as ANOTHER YEAR OLDER." So I changed it to "YEAR" before submitting.




It was "day." Like I knew it was in the first place. So no beer for you, Ray! How about film?

Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller play a wealthy phonetics professor and a Cockney flower girl, respectively, in what 1938 British comedy film?

Now here, my brain got blocked on it at first with some stray Shakespeare, of Shrew and Kiss Me Kate, but finally, poof! Pygmalion popped into my head, and onto my screen. But wait! That was the play! The film was something else, right, right?!? OH YEAH, My Fair Lady!, he second-impressioned....



And was wrong. My Fair Lady was the 60s musical adaptation. The British comedy used the title of the original Shaw play. A full third of the players across the various levels fell into the same trap I did, almost as many as got it right.

So the lesson here is always trust your first impression!  Like with this:

Under the rule of the Hohenstaufen dynasty—in particular Frederick I, Henry VI, and Frederick II—what monarchy reached its greatest extent in terms of both power and territory?

I did not know that.  Guesses are fine, though. "Germany" seemed too obvious and probably anachronistic, so probably something similarly Teutonic. I put down Austria, but then thought, nah, he couldn't mean Holy Roman Empire, could he? On THIS one, I trusted my first impression, and....



It was Holy Roman Empire, Batman!

Unlike the Feud, though, you don't necessarily lose with three strikes. Depends on how well you and your opponent answer and score questions. And this morning, I discovered that those other three correct answers of mine were enough for a win, and I remain in sole possession of first place after four rounds.

It won't last. At least that's my first impression.

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After finishing my Wednesday morning round of useless brain activity, I turned to the real events of that day. I had only one scheduled commitment: showing up at 1:30 for a foreclosure auction. My first impression on this one was that I had a bad feeling about it. It’s a weird situation where I’m representing neither the owner of the property nor the lender with the mortgage on it; my client is its former owner, who got swindled by the current one and only found out about the proceeding when a friend of hers happened to notice the publication of the auction notice a few months ago. The owner took her, me and the lender on a brief and unsuccessful detour into bankruptcy, but it got rescheduled for Wednesday afternoon, and I had my instructions and financial arrangements in place to give the client a shot at getting the property back.

The same lawyer who forced the detour into bankruptcy in June filed  a last minute Hail Mary motion lead on Tuesday to try to get the sale postponed. While doing other work all Wednesday morning, I would refresh my link to the case docket like Pavlov‘s dog to see if it had been granted or denied. When neither turned out to be the case, I grabbed the file and the checkbook, and headed downtown to the local equivalent of “the courthouse steps“ where these auctions have always taken place. Because of the “bad feeling about it,“ I got there plenty early and waited a few minutes for the usual entourage of referee, bank attorney and foreclosure vultures to arrive. Nobody else was there. 

That would be when I checked the actual notice of the sale, and discovered they had scheduled it to be conducted, not at the usual "courthouse steps" auction location, but at the house itself. Which is about a two minute drive from my office. In all my years doing this,  I have never known a judicially conducted foreclosure sale to be conducted at the premises, except in a couple of very rare commercial building cases. I was so focused on getting the when right, I didn’t have the correct where.

Still, I had gotten downtown plenty early, and everything in Buffalo takes 20 minutes to get to, so I arrived on the subject street barely 10 minutes after the scheduled start time of the proceeding. Usually, there is a ritual that occurs at the beginning, if the sale even starts on time, of the court appointed referee reading off a lengthy notice. They usually reread the full notice of sale out loud, followed by a detailed “terms of sale“ listing of what potential buyers are required to provide and are getting in return. They will often also take attendance and even identification from potential bidders. It is rare for that process to take less than the 10 minutes I was late getting onto the street. Even after that, successful bidder has to sign a memorandum of sale, anyone other than the lender has to make a deposit, and that’s at least another five minutes.

That is, unless nobody wants there to be an actual auction in the first place. Then, the lender and the referee check their watches, agree to a waiver of all readings, the lender puts in his bid in record time, and everybody’s gone by the time anybody shows up. And that appears to be what happened here. I have a timestamp photo on my phone of the empty house yard and driveway at 1:44.  The lender's attorney did return one email from me confirming that it did not get postponed and that his client bought it back, but when I inquired into the details of exactly when and where it happened, he started ghosting me.

I then had the unpleasant task of having to report this to the client, and also advised them that because my delay had contributed, if they wanted to make a claim about it on my insurance, they were  welcome to do so. I then heard the best words you could hear under those circumstances: “of course not.”

Because good people hire good people.  There remain options, inside and outside the foreclosure process, and we will focus on those instead of getting all unpleasant about it.

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That brings us up to date until the end of Thursday's workday. Our adventures in multimedia poetry Thursday and possibly tomorrow night, and a dull but ultimately decent day today, will probably be the next thing chronicled here.  Unless I change my mind after writing things down:P