oops

does everyone remember this?

well, now i present to you, this:


it turns out that i'm not just a disaster in the kitchen when drunk, i'm just a disaster in the kitchen. what's so tragic about this is that i had actually made a decent dinner! not delicious, but not bad. (ok, so i'm not sure how that has any bearing on my burning the pot.) and the even WORSE part is that i HAD turned off the stove! only it turns out i had undershot "off" and turned it to "high." and this picture doesn't really do justice to how bad i seemed to have somehow burned the bejeezus out of a pot in just a few minutes unattended on the stove, but well, i think it's ruined. it is no longer sparkly silver, but is dark and tarnished and all screwed up.

but, i'm going to take a page from jenny's new year's resolution. here are the things i have decided are the bright side of this:
(1) it was a really cheap pot. and one i had bought myself, so at least i don't have to feel guilt.
(2) i now know that when you leave a burner on on the stove, if you walk back into that room, it's really obvious. which gives me way more peace of mind about burning down my house from accidentally leaving my stove on. b/c i don't ever turn it on before i leave for the day, you know. just in the evening. which means i'm right here to catch it if the house burns down. so that's something!

in other news, at about 5 today i was asked if i would want to help out on a doc review that needed to be done by tomorrow. of course i said yes, b/c well, i flippin' love the DR! and my hours have not been up to snuff this month. like really not good. what i was not told was that i would still be sitting around at 9:09 waiting for the documents to be uploaded to the system so that we could start. on a doc review that has to be completed by 9am tomorrow. yup, not just tomorrow. tomorrow about the time i usually get out of bed. and my bedtime is drawing closer with every second. even before i knew that i wouldn't have started by now, i stopped and bought a big old can of red bull. do you guys know how expensive red bull is? it's ridiculous! anyways. i'm hoping that the system goes down and we get told to go to sleep and they ask for an extension. which means i'd be DRing thru the weekend, but at least i'd get to sleep tonight!

just one more

please comment before the morning if you think adding mushrooms would be a bad idea. i have them all cut up for the alternative recipe, which i had not mentioned b/c it did not have a half cup of butter in it, and i think i should use them lest they go bad, and it doesn't seem like a terrible idea b/c mushrooms go very well with chicken, lemon, herb, garlic, and butter, don't they? maybe a smidge extra water? hm. well, i don't know if anyone can tell, but i'm a little bit psyched. my inner happy monologue is raging again!

i'm sure it'll pass by tomorrow.

they had it!

i know some of you weren't going to be able to sleep unless you knew the answer. so yes, they had the lemon herb sauce. AND they had fresh lemons, and i would bet i can't fall asleep tonight for debating whether or not i should put it in. compromise--squeeze fresh lemon over final dish? which will be left in crockpot a few extra hours and may taste like rubberized rotten sock chicken anyways? yes, perfection.

dear god, it's happening again

i'm making real dinner for tomorrow night. i have had a crockpot for many years, but have never used it. but it seems like the perfect solution for someone who gets home late and wants dinner immediately. well, i've still never used it. but this weekend, before going to the grocery store, i picked out a recipe from my crockpot cookbook and bought the ingredients. well, i pretty much bought the ingredients. one of the ingredients is a package of "lemon herb" seasoning. only the stupid grocery store didn't have lemon herb! only garlic herb! which i bought. but now, here i am, cutting up everything for tomorrow's dinner and i'm really thinking that garlic herb is not as delicious as lemon herb. incidentally, i've also cut up the 4 massive cloves of garlic the recipe calls for and put them with the chicken in the fridge. ergo, if i use what i've got, i've got garlic garlic herb chicken. and i love garlic way more than the next guy, but this might be a bit much. so i have decided to bundle up, brave the cold i loathe so much, and see if my totally crappy grocery store down the street, has the lemon herb. my thought was that if it didn't, i would just buy a fresh lemon and use that. and i figure that might be a bad idea. i mean, the recipe doesn't call for a lemon. but if you're going to throw the wrong thing in a recipe, why not let it simmer for 8-10 hours and heighten the terrible flavor even more? yeah, even that sounds like a disaster. the problem is that that whole realization about the double garlic didn't come upon me til i started typing this. which means that my backup plan also fails b/c not only do i have a lemon that has cooked until it is rubberized and tastes like rotten sock, and simmers for 8-10 hours so everything else in the pot tastes like rubberized rotten sock, but i've also realized that there's double the garlic. so when i arrive home tomorrow, i could very well be eating garlic garlic rubberized lemon rotten sock chicken. in an apartment that reeks of garlic.

or, fingers crossed, the safeway has the one packet of seasoning i need.

god, i am on pins and needles right now...

i have made real dinner!

this is a total triumph and it is only 8:05 and i am eating and well, i'm just so delighted with myself! yes, it is only a salad, but it has two freshly cut up vegetables (mushrooms, green onions), one herb (chives, only b/c i have fresh chives in my fridge and i truly have no idea what to do with them. i know there was a specific reason i bought them, but i'm sure they'll have rotted long before i remember what that is), one thing cooked on the stove (BACON!), fruity flavored blue cheese, and a dressing i made from scratch w/o even measuring the ingredients (like a real chef does! balsamic, olive oil, mustard, and garlic, if you're interested). yes, so far every bite i have had has been nearly 100% spinach leaf, and i'm going to wind up with all of those other ingredients sitting soggily in a big clump in all the dressing left at the bottom of the bowl, but who cares?!?! I MADE DINNER! real dinner!

also, in other news that has nothing to do with my delicious dinner at all, today i was exasperatedly raising my voice at my boss and calling him by his full name (not all three names, just not the shortened version of his first name, like i usually do), when another partner walked by and said i sounded like his mother. i like working with people for whom this is ok. plus, he had totally done something exasperating, and needed to be reprimanded! and now he is leaving for a week and a half, with the deadline in like two weeks, meaning he's leaving me to deal with it. i have really got to get myself on the docketing system for all these cases, so that i can nag him in the time leading up to the time when he finally decides things should be dealt with. but that is all fine b/c we have decided to have a "who is bronzer" contest when we're both back in the office in two and a half weeks and i have realized that i am totally going to have the advantage b/c i will be on the tropical island the week before said contest and he will have been in the office. score!

lucky pennies and other things

lucky pennies are just the best. i wish i could say that i wasn't someone who stopped to pick up all coinage from the ground, but that would be a blatant lie. one of my friends likes to tell the story (well, it's not really much of a story) of when we were in vegas one night, exiting a casino in a swarm of people, and i thought i heard a coin hit the ground, so i stopped and started looking on the ground. that is perfectly good money! basically, unless there are really very questionable surroundings to a coin on the ground, i'm going to stop and get it. and questionable doesn't mean it's lying in a dirty street. it means in a puddle of dirty water or touching a dead bird or something.

but the point is that it just puts you in a really good mood. first of all, you're like, i found a penny! score! then it's head up! that's a lucky penny! (slight dilemma, some people say they're bad luck if they're tails up. whether or not i follow this line of thought depends on my mood and whether there is someone with me, telling me it's bad luck to pick up a tails up penny. jerks.) anyways, the lucky penny gives you a warm fuzzy. but then, invariably, i just have to laugh aloud at the fact that i am stopping in the middle of the street to pick up a penny. i get a kick out of that nearly ever time. i mean, what can you even buy with a penny these days?

in other news that has nothing to do with lucky pennies, and isn't news at all, i decided to walk home this evening. it started b/c i had to walk around for a while looking for a kinkos that hadn't yet had its last fed ex pickup for the night (don't ask, but let's just say i'm getting more annoyed with my secretary with every passing day), and by the time i found said kinkos, i was already at metro center and decided i was actually plenty warm, and if i had to wait for a metro, it would probably take the same amount of time, and i had really enjoyed walking home in the fall, and i never get any physical activity these days and it would be good for me. so what i realized a couple of blocks later was that the top half of my body, in its sweater and coat and very warm scarf that is literally like another shirt and wraps around my neck twice, and my hat, and my lined leather gloves, my upper body was actually more than toasty. it was downright about to burst into flames. but what this had prevented me from realizing initially was that my winter pants are at the dry cleaner (yes, i only have one pair of winter pants. well, there had been two pairs, but i got too fat for the other pair. most weeks this is what skirts and dresses are for. other weeks, this is what the fact that i'm not ashamed to wear the same pair of pants multiple days in a row is for) and i was wearing what i had previously thought were just less warm winter pants and wore as winter pants all last season (tho i had not been wearing them all season b/c i didn't think they'd be toasty enough). i discovered today that these are more like fall pants, and i discovered this at exactly that point in my 25 degree, 2 mile walk, where i was exactly far enough away from all the right lines of public transportation, that it really only made sense for me to carry on for the remaining mile or so. anyways, by the time i got home, my legs were frozen like icicles, which i know is not at all anything anyone cares about, but well, too bad. i'm trying to work on more interesting stories, but i think i'm going to have to spend less time at the office before i have many of those.

roger schechter! MY roger schechter?!?!

so the beauty of law firms is how easy it is to find people. generally i do this for personal reasons. xyz law firm is laying people off. i search for UVA grads (associates, if that's a possible function in their search engine) to see who i know might be affected. or such and such a friend has been talking about a guy at her firm. look him up. is he cute? today i actually needed to use this function for work (opposing counsel's email address). so i search for his last name in the firm's attorney directory. in addition to this guy, my search also generates a hit for roger schechter. ROGER SCHECHTER! my FAVORITE bar bri professor! i don't join FB groups willy nilly (seriously, i think joining a FB group is a really big commitment), and even i'm in a roger schechter group. alas, i didn't think the guy looked right and the bio made no mention of him being a torts god, and double alas, a quick google confirmed that it's a totally different roger schecter. but still. i'm not even kidding when i say that my heart stopped for a minute at the excitement of it all. dear god. that's sad.

not a bad night

so i haven't been working a lot lately. for a long time i was swamped, so i was telling DM that i couldn't take any more work. of course, now that my lit work is done, i'm nearly all caught up and don't have that much to keep me busy. rather than work a few more hours and find myself w/o anything to do the rest of the week, i decided to come home at about 6:30. and b/c...well, no reason, i decided i really wanted a margarita.

so i came home, warmed up the margaritaville for the first time in a long while, and made myself "dinner." yes, that is a bowl of pre-made chicken, cheese, and salsa. it's like a fajita w/o a tortilla. no, that's not for health reasons. that's b/c there aren't any tortillas in my home and i'm too lazy to go to the grocery store. and that is a ginormous mug of margarita. notice dinner is in quotes and margarita isn't. that's the way it should be.

and then i turned on my tv, to find something to watch at this unusually early hour to be home, AND I FOUND BOSTON COLLEGE HOCKEY! which excited me tremendously, except i follow their schedule pretty closely, and was pretty sure they had already played their set against vermont over the weekend. so now i'm watching a hockey game, in which we're up 2-0 at the end of the first, and i know we're going to lose by a score of 4-2. good point. maybe i'll take this opportunity to find something else to watch.

or, as you can tell from the background in the picture, maybe i could use the time to do something more productive. like clean my apartment. tho as you could probably also gather from the picture, there isn't really much chance of that happening. baby steps.

yes, i know my posts are totally lame these days. i swear i'm trying to be less lame, but i'm afraid life isn't giving me much to work with these days.

no promises

let's be honest, i'm probably not going to start posting frequently. if we were to be honest, the main reason is that i simply don't see the funny little things in life like i did when i was in law school. i'm more of a bitter, sad lawyer these days. but i had something happen today and i wanted to share it. since i've never been one to shy away from talking about personal things in a slightly detached way, my first thought was to post it on a blog i had been keeping for one person. who never read it, but at least i felt like i was sharing. and then at some point, i decided that rather than do that, i could share it with the whole world of people. where, once again, no one was actually reading. but we'll see. maybe i'll start up again. maybe y'all will give me reason to see the silly things that are there every day. or maybe i won't post again for 11 months.

also, for the record, please don't expect much from this post.

so. i'm going to work this morning. not prime going to work time. i wish i could say that's b/c it was one of those rainy gross days, where you wish that the real world had rain days and you didn't have to go to work. but, if i were honest, i'm never out of bed before 9am, so i'm not exactly commuting in with the rush hour crowd. so i'm getting to the metro, i've just picked up my morning express and i notice a man handing catalogues out at the top of the escalator. now i always think this is a pretty bad idea, but it's really really gross today. and he doesn't have an umbrella. and it really really looks like this catalogue (truly, not a brochure. i am totally fine with giving out chinese food menus at the top of the escalator. that seems like a great way to drum up business. but this is like a bona fide catalogue that shows up in your mail. and even when it's addressed to you, you throw it away.)--anyways, point is, it totally looks like a catalogue selling farm equipment.

so there's this amish-looking man (is that wrong to say? he had the beard.), standing in the rain, at a not peak time, in the middle of the city where people are taking public transportation to work. selling farm equipment. well, i'll be honest, i take these things when they're chinese food menus. hell, that could do me good. so i take this one. i feel so bad for this man!

of course, as soon as i take it, i feel bad, b/c this is a nice brochure. it's got thick shiny pages and professional pictures! that's not cheap! and no one is under any delusion that i am going to use these products! they shouldn't be wasting their brochures on me!

anyways, the complete line of products listed on the front of the brochure includes animal nutrition, crop management, roofing systems, and vehicle products. WHY in god's name is this man handing these out in the middle of an urban area?!?! i don't even own a car, let alone farming equipment or livestock!!!

but now, b/c i have flipped thru all the pages of the brochure (seriously, if he wanted to sell farming equipment, i might have been one of his best guesses, despite the fact that i can't even open the back door to my patio (can anyone help me with that?) and now i feel terrible! i wish i could help him! i wish i had livestock that needed something!

BUT if you need rooting systems (yes, that's what it seems like this guy does. there's a card inside my catalogue), i totally have someone to recommend to you.

that was kind of a lame first post in a year, wasn't it? well, maybe i'll at least drum up some business for Conklin.