incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Power's out but our backup generator is working (hurray! So worth it!) and the phone lines aren't down yet so I even have Internet. The awesome neighbors helped me move every damn thing in the backyard yesterday, I have backup water and plenty to eat, the sump pump is working, and now all I have to do is watch the wind and rain outside (so far, on the bad end of a normal summer storm, but our yard already looks like a swamp and it's only going to get worse), do periodic leak checks, and stay comfy. Chad's theoretically still on his way back from his trip tonight (we'll believe it when we see it, but he has backup plans), and SteelyKid was already visiting her grandparents a couple hours west. So all is well here and I hope you all are well too, wherever you are.

PS: does anyone have suggestions for trees that are shady but not as shady as maples? We can't get anything ground-cover-ish to grow in a large chunk of our backyard because a couple of maples cast really dense shade for most of the day. I have been resisting getting rid of them because I love shade, but I think it's really time we had drainage rather than packed mud for a backyard. Would it be possible to replace them with something that is only partly shady, that would still let grass grow while keeping the yard from completely baking? We're in zone 5 if the Internet can be believed, btw.

Home home home home home home.

And now, among many many other things, to buy a generator so we never have to do this again.

Last week, I was supposed to take a deposition on Thursday, at a prison about two hours away. On Wednesday, I called to make sure everything was set up, and learned that the prisoner was transferred. Yesterday. To a prison literally around the corner, but they wouldn't bring him back for the deposition, nor would they let me into the other prison on one day's notice. It ended up being for the best, because if I had taken the deposition Thursday, I would have come back to a letter from the court that basically meant I would have had to depose the prisoner again later. I was still not pleased, though.

Random minor events on Thursday: jobs for everyone! Two people we know, a law school classmate of mine, and one of Chad's former students, let us know that they got good jobs. And our bay window was put in and looks very nice.

And then there was the Blackout. ( Our experience was hardly deserving of the capital letter )

As a bonus, on Friday we were let out at 1:00 to conserve power and help get downstate back up. I came home and read a book (see the book log), went out for dinner and to buy the sequels, and then read one of them.

On Saturday, we went looking for a dog and decided we weren't going to any more shelters on the "Oh, why not?" theory, because it was just too wrenching. We headed up to Lake George to see how long a drive it would be for Albacon—about an hour each way—and had good Mexican food on the way back. Then we watched the video of The Golden Spiders, the Nero Wolfe TV movie that came before the series. It was pretty good; it had a better Saul (the actor who played Lon Cohen in the series; he was recast because of time commitments), but didn't have a lot of the details quite down yet.

Sunday, did a ton of laundry, read the other sequel, helped Chad fix our gate fence, and spent the evening in that lovely tired-but-insomniac state. Grr. Thus, on Monday I went to bed early, and Tuesday I wrote a week in review post that got eaten, and I gave up in disgust. (Also, the rest of our windows were installed.)

On Wednesday we got our new dog, Emmy, as already mentioned here. ( Dog talk, the good and the bad )

I have two sets of legal papers to get out Tuesday, before we leave, plus doing laundry and packing and all that. Then we're off to Chicago for a week. We'll have Internet access, but don't expect to see us much until the middle of next week.

Belated meme: I've added a "policy" on friending, linking, etc., to my user info.

Link of the week: Letters from Space (specifically, the Space Station).

 . . . sleep in our own bed tonight!

The power came back on sometime today—thankfully, because staying in the hotel last night was utterly miserable.

There were a grand total of nine cars in the parking lot when we checked in. Even though the hotel was virtually empty, the clerk put us next door to someone else. And either the walls in those rooms are paper-thin, or the volume on the next-door TV was all the way up—or both—because we could hear the next-door person's TV very clearly. In fact, we could hear it very clearly all night.

I didn't fall asleep until sometime after 12:30. And I woke up at 2:43, and 4:23 (which was disconcerting until I re-assembled the numbers in the right order in my head), and 6:11, and then stayed basically awake until the alarm went off at 7:00.

And the TV was still on!

Surprisingly, I had a pretty productive day despite my serious sleep-deprivation. Got two things sent off that had been on my back for a while. One was a form of writing that I'm out of practice in, so it was just a relief to finally have it done. It will probably be revised to death by my supervisors, which I'm currently unconcerned about (we'll see how long that holds up during the actual revision process). The other was motion papers in a case that's probably my most important to date, in terms of the breadth of the immediate consequences if we lose. (I give it 50-50 odds that my papers will seriously annoy opposing counsel. Oh well . . . )

It looks like no further water damage was done to stuff in the basement, so that's good. I really should have cleaned tonight, but it's been an effort staying awake long enough for the basketball game. Which is now on, so I will leave you all.