Ugh. I'm starting to hate Mondays. So even though it is technically Monday, let us look back upon what was a lovely Sunday:



Bitchfest after the jump.( Read more... )

Sometimes I feel like such a juvenile. When my driving coach suggested getting together on Friday to do some work on my car, and on my driving, I couldn't have been happer to take the day off from work. I am pretty much the only person in the office starting next Monday, so I thought it would be a perfect time to grab a day off and have some fun.( Read more... )

Hello, world! I'm here. Things are fine. I've been busy as hell, is all. Several things at work have ballooned and I'm covered up with inv3$tigations and all the attendant details, logistics, constant phone calls at all hours, and work work work.

Fun thing about this one, lots of recordings. Getting them formally transcribed takes forever. I have been listening to them and making notes, transcribing juicy bits. It's very laborious to do on the computer. I long for my old dictation machine with the foot pedals to stop, advance, etc.

Somebody is stopped outside my house. A potential buyer? I may have to scramble. Nobody's been here to look at the house since the first week it went on the market. Still! And I've been a little under the weather so it's not looking its best today. ( Read more... )

I always feel like I'm in a massive David-and-Goliath-esque struggle when I go up against teams of lawy3rs repres3nting the huge compani3s I take to court for breaking the law. I wrote about this trial in earlier entries, and did I write about how scary it was to enter the stipulat3d fact$ and then sit down and r3st my ca$e without calling the first witn3ss? Well the d3cision came out today. Once again, David took down Goliath. We spanked em good. I love it when that happens.( Read more... )

LOVE this art table done by Rich Marcks. My town is depicted as "Where the Chukker Used to Be."

On turns...

My sleeping is all turned around. Well, turned around from "normal" people. It's my normal, I guess. The recent variation involves actually laying down when I feel sleepy, and sleeping. Tonight I fell asleep on the sofa at around 9PM. I awoke at 1AM, all confused. Got up. Did a few chores. Thought about how crazy my morning is going to be. Sat down here. Wide awake.( Read more... )

Oh, my brain. She's working overtime. There's been the big thing at work, which was kind of finished, then kind of not. Then there was supposed to be a meeting then my father died then I was waiting to hear about the next meeting, which will be tomorrow (today). I had to do some more refinement on the big thing, and I went ahead and sent it around, even though technically part of it depended on a decision that will come out of the meeting which has not has not happened yet. Is this making any sense?

OK. So. How my brain works.( Read more... )

The last time dad was in the hospital, he tells me he was 18.
He had an emergency appendectomy on Christmas morning.

My poor parents. More excitement! The hospital sent my father back to the nursing home again this afternoon. By midnight, he was on his way back out the door, this time to the emergency room. Those fuckers discharged him from the hospital with a fever and low blood pressure. Sepsis, anyone? Within two hours of getting back to the nursing home, his vitals were tanking.

While my mother dealt with the immediate details, I put in the call to the surgeon's office to let him know dad was going back to the hospital via the ER. The nursing home is actually on the campus of a different hospital, different hospital system entirely. For reasons I've mentioned before, we stayed put. But when the nursing home called my mother tonight and asked if they could take my dad to the "other" (university) hospital, she said YES. ( Read more... )

Writing for a living is not fun to me. I don't consider myself a writer, but the fact is, most of what I do to make my living is to write. I write, write, write. All law stuff - memos, briefs, letters. Right now, I'm in the middle of the same huge project I've been talking about for weeks (months?). I am waffling about a conclusion on part of it. As with many things, there is law to support opposing conclusions. It doesn't happen often, but I just can't make up my mind about this one. Did they break the law or not? The answer to that dictates how I set the whole thing up, and I just can't make up my mind. ( Read more... )

Good Lord, the fun, it just never stops around here. So they got my dad all packed up from the little hospital and off to the nice nursing home. He got there around 5PM and so they did his intake assessments the next morning. Friday morning. By noon, mom had all his stuff packed in her car, and dad was taken by ambulance back to the big hospital. Seems they sent him to the nursing home with an active leak in one of his surgical sites, and it was something the nursing home couldn't deal with. Thank God, it's not a big emergency. My dad is holding his own and was doing fine when I left him this evening.( Read more... )

Of course, I've calmed down since that last entry. Sure feels good to vent. Sometimes I worry about the impression I leave when I cut loose like that. As you might imagine, that stuff comes much more easily on the written page than it does in real time. Would you believe I am actually pretty low-key and easy-going in person? Most of the time, anyway.( Read more... )

My father (front) and his older brother in some traditional garb, around 1938 or so.
Click this photo to see a few more vintage family shots.

The days seem to be flying by. Has it been a week since I last updated? It's Wednesday and I'm home until Saturday, then it's back to Atlanta for the weekend, maybe through Monday. Things continue to rock along OK for my father. We had our big "family m33ting" at the hospital, and it was really helpful. We are still having to fight incredibly stupid battles (still with the bladd3r!) but despite all the big and small things that are just screwed up, my father is slowly improving. ( Read more... )

Looking at my little calendar in the sidebar, I see that I have not posted on a single Thursday during December. I didn't do it on purpose. In fact, this morning, I said to myself, I said, "Self, today is Thursday, so be sure to get an entry up there!" But I got crazy busy today and now it's 2:00 Friday morning and Thursday is gone and I have gone the whole month with no Thursday posts. Huh. Oh well. ( Read more... )

Crack factory!

Alright, well that's done. Whew! I was so tired when I got home earlier this evening, I wanted to just crash. I did nod off for a few with the dogs on the sofa, but as DreamGuy was going to bed, I got up another head of steam, and got my holiday baking pretty much done. It's not like I had much choice. If I wanted to take baked stuff to people in Atlanta, it was now or never. So I did, gosh I am not sure, about eight batches of Christmas Crack (posted the recipe 2 days ago as "Home Made Heath Bar Candy"), and three batches of candied pecans. Tomorrow morning, I will finish packing it all up into gift tins and bags, and it'll be ready to go. Some is going to folks here, and some will come to Atlanta. The house smells delicious!( Read more... )

At work, I keep running into this little communication problem with my boss. We get lots of pressure from above to move things out at the end of the month. All the reporting is done on a monthly basis, and my boss's boss watches our statistics like a hawk. I have these huge things I'm working on, with thousands of pages of stuff being submitted in just the past couple of weeks. I can't even get it all indexed, much less examined, considered, researched, and worked into a revised final report, by the end of this month. So imagine my horror when today, after weeks of hearing, "Just keep plugging at it," I heard instead, "So, do you want to do a final report, or present it in a meeting?" Obviously he was talking about something that would happen soon. How soon? That would be tomorrow. Yeesh.( Read more... )

Today was a super-busy work at home day. I spent most of it up to my eyeballs in digital documents I have to review. I got maybe an eighth of them eyeballed. Groan! But tomorrow I get a little break from all the drudgery, only to take part in another kind of drudgery. I'll be driving to Atlanta early in the morning, and meeting my sister at her house. From there we'll head over to the courthouse, where her long-awaited divorce hearing is scheduled to take place.

Her hubby's parents have convinced him to be intractible about certain financial things, and all sisterly bias aside (really!) I do believe he can't get all he thinks he's entitled to. My sister's attorney believes the same, or she'd never take the case to trial. I'm bringing a book just in case. I'm just there to be a friendly face in the crowd for my little sister. So send all the good ju-ju you can my sister's way, would you? She's really done amazingly well, especially considering all the rough patches she's negotiated in her life. Once this is behind her, she'll at least know what her financial situation is going to be, and hopefully she'll have some steady support for her three kids.( Read more... )

Foggy morning commute.

Oh, the power!( Read more... )

I love this holiday display on top of the downtown fire station.

Here I am at 11:30, scrambling to post an entry before midnight. Gah!( Read more... )

Pretty tree.

Today at work, I found myself Googling information about how to determine how many pages are in a megabyte of computer memory. Starting out, I knew the calculation would be imprecise, because the 175+ megabytes of memory I was wondering about are comprised of at least five different document types. So using this handy table, I computed an average of the numbers corresponding to the five document types, and it came out to 100 pages per megabyte. That, multiplied by 175 megs, is 17,500 pages. And I fear this is a very conservative estimate.( Read more... )