Lawyerin'
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Guitar Fixed! And Other News
I’m not sure if I shared here, but somehow the neck of my guitar was broken . . . by children, no doubt. It’s a cheap guitar and I don’t play anywhere but for myself, so I was distressed at the prospect of having to pay for a new one, but turns out it’s not too hard to fix a guitar with a snapped neck. (Who knew?) $60 later and it’s playing just fine. There was a more expensive option that would have made it look good as new and involved sanding and re-staining, but that seemed silly, so I now have a guitar that plays just fine but has…
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Tuesday Evening Retroactive Meal Planning
It is a Tuesday evening. Every work-night last week – including Friday – I worked until midnight-ish, after giving the children my dinner hour. It’s been a lot of nights on the couch, dialed into the network and typing while the children snore upstairs. I’m a little tired but now that I’ve sort of accepted this as status quo for the time being, I’m just pleased that I’ve quickly become quite popular with the partners and am essentially drowning in work, all because they keep picking me for assignments. I did a handful of hours on Saturday morning as well, while the children watched Saturday morning cartoons and fetched their…
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Rain
It’s raining now – it’s been raining all day. In my new office, my entire exterior wall is a window, which floods the room with light on most days – but today, it was dim as twilight all day long. Below my window is one of the busier streets in the city – I can see tiny people and cars tootling along the street, more than a dozen floors below me. I look out over the river every day, where blue water vessels churn the mighty Mississip. The small slice of river I can see peeking through the skyscrapers seems to be a place where giant container ships make a turn –…
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Gratitude & Anxiety, in Equal Measure
My week+2 days off is drawing to a close, and I feel (as my title would suggest) both anxiety and gratitude. Sometimes it can be hard to relax, even with a week off, since I have been conditioned to experience time as a scarcity, to be jealously hoarded. I am used to stressing about how to fit exactly what needs done in exactly the time allotted – like one of those sliding puzzle games where tiles are trapped in a groove and you have to slide them around each other to put them in place. It’s hard to turn this off like a switch. I tried rationally to dole out relaxation…
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Summer 2017
The boys just had their last day of school. They had a little graduation that neither of us went to, and Jack was pretty peeved about that, but too bad. I’ll go when he actually graduates from the school, but there’s no need for graduation every darn year. I love their school but this last week of school had about a million parent events, which always crimp us working parents. They’re spending the first week of summer at Vacation Bible School, and then the two big boys head to Ireland for a whole month with their father. He is teaching a class over there, and so lodging, food, and intra-Ireland…