it's like a post where i don't have to write anything!

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

i know that not many people visit, but if you haven't taken a look at this yet, i'd recommend it. lexi and i cried b/c that's what we do.

you can learn more and sign a petition here.

and since i'm not prone to really talk about these sorts of things, lest i show that i'm not really very informed, even when i do have an opinion on things, that's all i'm going to say about that.

one for the road

so i am supposed to be hopping in a cab in less than 7 hours to head to the airport. i still have to do some research and modify a Response to Office Action and get dave a better answer and finish packing, and of course, i'm writing a blog entry.

so my uncle is going to be with us in hawaii, and i am looking forward to having someone to throw a ball around with. no, i'm not particularly active, but throwing a football on a beach is always a good time. til my arm gets tired and i wimp out. but my silly football was a bit deflated, so i went an bought a ball pump today. but when i got home, i couldn't get it to inflate the ball! it really didn't seem to be doing any good. of course, the device is so easy to use that there isn't an instruction manual to tell me what i'm doing wrong. but i found this, which is something. anyways, in the end, i think i figured it out (you have to put the needle in so far that the ball starts to deflate? but once it deflated halfway, i could totally tell that it was inflating. tho i could never get it as full as i wanted it to be, so maybe that is as full as it gets and i bought the pump for nothing.) except in the end,i have decided to deflate the ball for packing and take the empty ball and the pump with me. i'm not actually sure this is a better idea or that it even packs any better, but at this point, i'm going with it. maybe my dad or uncle can at least teach me how to use a ball pump! so that would be something.

anyways, i'm really excited about taking a real vacation! after having made the mistake of trying a few of my summer clothes on, i'm thinking i might wish it wasn't a beach vacation. oh well, i'm too excited to care much, i think!

huzzah for hawaii!!

ok, maybe i'll share one more

b/c it made me laugh aloud. i still like to see what people used to get here, tho it is certainly way fewer people than it used to be, which is fair b/c i don't ever post anymore and i'm really not delightfully entertaining anymore. recently i actually thought about creating new posts that were really just links to old posts. i thought this would keep the joy alive. i mean, who reads old blog posts, but if they were NEW blog posts, linking to old blog posts....

anyways. search terms used to find me today: what is doc review

loves it. much like i feel about doc review, actually.

nothing really

(1) yesterday, i found a penny sitting on the metro turnstile thing as i walked out. i didn't even have to bend over to get it! awesome. (and yes, heads up.)

(2) it turns out that i DO have two pairs of winter pants, just as i had initially thought. it's just that the pair i thought was the second pair wasn't winter pants, and there was another pair that i have just completely not noticed all winter, hanging in my closet. on the hanger right next to the pair i wear all the time. oh well.

(3) i told you it wasn't anything, but they seemed like valid followups to recent posts. you know, in case people are reading. hm.

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.