Weekend!
It feels like the last few months have been an absolute blur. After slogging through The Holidays (and associated tribulations) we pretty much had a countdown to Disneyland (and I had a countdown to vacation) which sucked all of the proverbial oxygen out of the room.
Now I look at the schedule and future schedule and think “Huh… there’s really nothing on it.”
I mean, sure. We’ve got stuff penciled in such as gaming nights with the gaming group and dinner with friends that we don’t see often enough but there isn’t really anything that falls outside of the normal range of day-to-day chaos for months and months.
Now, the downside is that the next real block of days off is the Memorial/Independence/Labor Day block, but the upside is that everything is back to normal. Whew.
As such, this weekend is only going to have such things as the aforementioned gaming group, the aforementioned dinner with friends that we don’t see often enough, and the usual errands, chores, and laundry. And, with any luck, no surprises.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Photo is “Footrace finish line, 1925” from the Seattle Municipal Archives, used under a creative commons license)
Haircut, 6-year old wearing me out and not letting me sleep, and reading while 6-year old watches shows about volcanoes.Report
This is probably way too personal a question for a blog but do you mind if I ask why you take care of your son’s 6 year old step-brother on some weekends?
Apologies if this question is way too personal and private.Report
Nah, I don’t mind. I think I’ve mentioned that my son’s mother and I have had a back and forth custody battle for a long time. We’ve finally resolved it, almost certainly for good since he only has a year and a half of high school left, and that resolution is that he lives with me, goes to his mom’s house every odd weekend along with the other stuff (stays with her an extended period of time in the summer, e.g.), and so on. In order to get her to finally agree to this and stop fighting it (it’s been my son’s wish for some time, but even at his age a parent can wreak a lot of havoc on the process), I agreed to let his little brother come over any time he wanted (which mostly means on weekends) so that he can spend as much time as possible with his brother before college and life separate them even more.
It helps that, even though he wears me the hell out because he has some behavioral issues, including pretty severe hyperactivity, he really is a good kid, and he loves staying at my place (he used to ask if he could just live there). Our typical phone conversation goes something like this:
Me: [Dialing] Ring…
6-year old answers his mom’s phone (knowing it’s me from caller ID): “Can I come to your house?”
So, pretty much every other weekend we’ve got the 6-year old, and we’re watching volcano documentaries and action movies with as many explosions as possible (because to him, that’s what movies are for: explosions).Report
In large measure, he’s right about the movies.Report
@burt-likko
Re: Movies
I dissent from your judgment.Report
@chris
This is what stepping up is all about.Report
@burt-likko
Sure. If you’re six years old.Report
Hopefully some boardgaming tomorrow. Either Cthulhu Wars or Shadows of Brimstone, most likely. I really need to get in with a real gaming group again. I left mine behind when I moved, and I have not gotten another one going.
Sunday, I will probably be doing some yardwork. I started pruning crape myrtles and pulling down climbing vines last weekend. I still have some cleanup leftover from that to do.Report
Brrr. We lost our water last night. I was scrambling to make sure that it wasn’t a bill that I had failed to pay. I found the last bill, which is due on the 23rd (the Automatic Bill Pay has been sent), and then went and looked at previous payments to make sure that I wasn’t floating a month behind. The city’s new mayor is apparently notorious about turning off water the day after payment is due (which is why I figured it wasn’t a floating debt), but (a) our neighbor’s water was fine and (b) it is apparently SOP for bills not to contain any past amount due. Frustratingly, they don’t take “safety payments” and will immediately return to you any excess money you send them. I misread the amount due a couple months ago and they sent me a check for fifty cents. I asked around about it, and they said they think it’s a hassle to have imbalanced accounts. More of a hassle than turning people’s water back off and on, apparently.
I think I may want to run for mayor. (No politics!)
Anyway, I made an emergency trip to Walmart to get some water jugs. The water was on by the time we got back. Very little water pressure, though. Taking a bath or shower is going to be difficult. We assume frozen pipes.
I hurt my back earlier in the week, but am mostly recovered.
I’m going to unload on what I think of the new season of The Blacklist come Sunday.Report
Pipe burst?Report
No sign of a burst anywhere.Report
Well that’s good. I wonder if it’s just frozen in there somewhere.Report
That’s my thinking. We have a high of ten degrees today, so it’s possible that we have a burst and we won’t find out until it melts?Report
Wow, cutting off water the day after payment is due, just on its own, is ridiculous. Doing that, and yet being inflexible about accepting extra payments, and not even including previous months’ outstanding balance on the bills, is insanely outrageous.Report
I’m considering just sending them a checks of $50 at the beginning of every month and forcing them to cut me a check every month.Report
What sort of randian nightmare, sorry, libertarian utopia, of a state do you live in that doesn’t have a notice requirement for utility disconnection?Report
Having a notice requirement does not mean it’s necessarily followed, especially if it’s the local government who chooses to ignore it.
Now in a libertarian utopia, there would be notice requirements (because we are all about trying to reduce the asymmetry of information), and you could send in extra money if you wanted to, and there would be multiple water utilities to choose from, because COMPETITION! Which of course means the water would be cleaner & better for you (because it’s a libertarian utopia, after all, so let’s be all pie-in-the-sky about it).Report
You inspired me to look up the state regs. You’re supposed to have 20 days after the due date to pay your bill. Twenty days! I didn’t see any notification requirements,though I didn’t read the whole thing. I was told they mail you a notification, which seems sufficient for twenty days but not for one.Report
Speaking of Randian nightmares…Report
Where I live, they don’t even bother sending a special notice if you only miss one payment – they just put the outstanding amount on the next bill. Years ago I got a notification that they were going to cut off one utility or other, I can’t remember which – but that was because I’d somehow failed to pay one bill, and then the next month paid the amount I owed to that utility provider, to a different utility company.Report
Travel, travel, travel. I’m wrapping up the first of a three-week stint in CT, which will be followed by more weeks in March, April and May. I honestly don’t mind the being here part, but the flights are killing me.
Tomorrow is going to be laundry, resupply and trying to remind my wife what a good cook I am so she misses me more when I am gone. I think there’s a free UFC on Sunday.Report
From where I sit, it doesn’t seem like BDL –> SDF would be so awful. Four, four and a half hours, tops I’d guess. And isn’t Cincinnati / Northern Kentucky a major hub for some airline still?
Is it that the connections are ridiculous, like having to change planes in Dallas or Denver or Atlanta with seven-hour layovers?Report
My company usually forces me to fly Southwest so it’s BDL – BWI – BDL. I have to be at the airport at 4pm and I will land at home at 10pm. And that is IF the winter storm in Louisville tonight doesn’t delay things. I’m sure if i flew business class it wouldn’t be a big deal. This is a first-world problem though. I’ll watch movies on my tablet, eat peanuts and be home in time for the 11pm news.Report
Oh yeah, weather. It’s kind of easy to forget about that here, where we have none (in short sleeves today for casual Friday, looking at a high of 73 today.)Report
Burt,
Interestingly, it is 13 degrees right now in East Hartford and 13 degrees back home in Louisville. The big fun is going to be flying home to another winter storm. Hopefully that means I actually make it.Report
Son of a b*tch. They just canceled my flight. Looks like I will fly out tomorrow morning. Ugh. It’s so much easier to enjoy winter weather when you’re at home in your jammies.Report
Sorry to hear that, man. You’ve gotta get a gig out here in California. Weather’s great here. Not so much water, but plenty of sunshine.Report
(Belated) Welcome to CT! You picked a lousy time to visit. May should be nice, trees will be budding by then.Report
@kenb
I love cold weather and snow so that isn’t a problem for me. But it does play havoc on travel arrangements. Getting up here on Monday was an adventure. I will still be coming up in April and May so looking forward to seeing spring in CT too.Report
This weekend, some close friends of ours are going to the hospital & having a twin-ectomy performed, so their little girl (who is a week younger than my boy) is staying with us, and by Sunday I should have a new God-daughter to
corruptplay with.ReportDouble congrats to your friends.Report
The twins & momma are all doing great!Report
Hurray!Report
LeeEsq is taking the California Bar next week so I am taking him out to a good luck dinner on Saturday.
On Sunday, I am going to the Ai Weiwei art installation at Alcatraz.Report
Holy crap! Good testing, @leeesq ! May the Force be with you and the odds ever in your favor!
(And thank you for helping address the well-documented shortage of attorneys here in the Golden State.)Report
Good luck Lee!Report
Good luck.Report
@burt-likko @chris @mad-rocket-scientist thank you everybody. I’ve been studying since September so I think I’m ready. I just have two more days of final review coming up.
Don’t worry about too many lawyers in California, my area is highly specialized. Seeing a non-immigration lawyer trying to do an immigration case is very painful to watch.Report
Excellent! Good luck!Report
Do any of the lawyers in the house know why states like to schedule their Bar exams on the exact same days? Are they just deliberately making the process difficult for aspiring attorneys? I’m taking the Bar next week as well, but in my case it’s Pennsylvania.Report
My best guess:
The bar exams are scheduled on the day that they are because the bar exams all include the Multistate Bar Exam, the 200-question multiple-choice portion of the exam. The MBE is a standardized test prepared by a single entity and administered by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, the same entity that writes and administers the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam.
Writing all those questions is hard. If you’ve never written a test before, give it a try. You’ll find that it’s really easy to write a ridiculously difficult question, and really easy to write a ridiculously easy question, but it’s actually quite challenging to come up with a fair question. And even the questions you think are ridiculously easy you’ll get a higher number of wrong answers than you would have though conceivable.
So the NCBE doesn’t have the practical ability to come up with a new test every month. They’re probably doing pretty good to come up with two tests a year. And since effectively every state uses the MBE as part of its bar examination procedure, that means you have to take it somewhere.
If you could take it on February 25 in, e.g., Pennsylvania and on March 5 in Ohio and on March 12 in Indiana, then the people who take it in Ohio would have an advantage over the people in Pennsylvania because someone from Pennsylvania could leak the questions to the people in Ohio. (And, I assume, charge good money for doing it.) Wouldn’t be fair.
So you can take the test once a year, which as a practical matter means you can seek admission by examination in only one jurisdiction at a time.
Did I mention, good luck and may the odds be ever in your favor? I hope to welcome you, @don-zeko , as a brother member of The Guild in a few months!Report
That guess makes a great deal of sense, @burt-likko . Of course, what this means is that there is a trade-off between the interests of new attorneys, particularly ones that have some level of ambiguity about what state they intend to practice in, and the interests of the state board of bar examiners and the NCBE. One might think that considering the hefty fees they charge to sit for the bar ($500 in PA and $700 in NC, where I’m going to take it in July, for a timely application, plus laptop fees of over $100 and of course a lengthy, burdensome, and intrusive application) that writing duplicate tests would not be an unreasonable expense. But then again, this is hardly the only case where the interests of aspiring guild members are valued much less than the interests of existing guild members and guild-related institutions.
Anyway, thanks for the prompt answer and the well-wishes.Report
Though it would make sense (it seems to me) to offer a March test that consists of the state-specific part only, with the MBE scores copied over from wherever you took the February test.Report
Tonight, dinner down in the big city with old friends who got grandma and grampa to be sitters for the night. Two-bottle minimum on the grape juice.
Tomorrow, refreshing myself on Chevron deference to prepare my explainer post for King v. Burwell and maybe reading the briefs. Then, hosting a long-lost friend from Oregon with ribs and cornbread.
Sunday, finishing up and posting the explainer, doing the taxes, and doing some exercise to work down the surplus calories built up over the previous two days.Report
Have fun with the briefs. 🙂 Hopefully you’re canvassing the amicus briefs, because Chevron’s not the only issue.
I recall reading one by the states that’s all about the ability of Congress to blindside states with major policy changes unannounced, or otherwise ‘hide’ provisions from States that impacts them or their decision making. (Sadly, I cannot recall which brief or what that’s called).
Given one of the core claims of the plaintiff’s is that Congress intended lack of subsidies to be an incentive to establish their own exchanges, rather than use the federal backstop, the fact that a number of states got together to file a brief that’s basically “Dude, if that was the plan, we were never told. And THAT would be unconstitutional or illegal per whatever”.
There’s some really good stuff in some of the amicus briefs, some of it dealing with the whole ‘ambiguity’ thing but a lot of it deals with entirely different elements of law.
I spent more time with the respondent’s side because I’ve read Adler going on ad nauseum about the plaintiff’s case on Volokh.
Sadly, Cannon’s last brief did not address standing at all. I was hoping they’d take a whack at it.Report
Out of curiosity, if Congress is not supposed to blindside states, can the President do it using authority that was granted by Congress? I’m thinking of the last few Presidents’ tendency to declare wilderness areas and National Monuments out of the blue. Often those have impacts on the states where the federal property lies.Report
Tomorrow evening: barbecue and dinner guests, in preparation for which, tomorrow daytime: a great deal of cleaning.
Sunday, I’m going back to my previous volunteer shift at the bike shop, which routine I’d been out of for some time.Report
I spent a big chunk of last weekend at a cuddling convention. I will spend a big chunk of this weekend at a church for sex offenders.
Sometimes I wonder at my life.Report
Tod’s Memo To Self: do NOT mix up these two upcoming calendar items.Report
Tod’s Memoir: Cuddling with Sex Offenders
Sounds like an Oprah Bookclub winnerReport
When do you go to the Brony convention?Report
If you get that Cuddling Convention thing published, you’ll have to let us know. I read a piece not too long ago on a Cuddle…Provider, I guess? Cuddle Worker? ProCuddler? Not sure what they call themselves.
Anyway, seems like a sadly-necessary service. Sometimes I think we hairless bonobos never shoulda left the trees.Report
One can only wonder at what a behavioral anthropologist would think of a cuddling convention were it to be encountered for the first time. “Oh, look, he’s presenting!” or maybe “So which one is asserting dominance?”Report
We’re social primates and we need to be groomed, and there’s a lot of lonely monkeys out there not getting any touch.Report
@burt-likko my feeling is that a behavior anthropologist would first feel “I need a drink.”Report
(I’ve actually read a set of suggested rules for cuddle parties. The first two, fight club style, are “No Dry Humping”. I realize that I hadn’t heard anything about cuddle parties since reading those rules. I guess it’s good to know that these things still can be found out in the wild.)Report
I am cleaning out the closet of doom and scrubbing toilets this weekend. So it’s a good thing we have gaming plans and dinner with friends plans, or I’d be in danger of having one of those weekends that feels like more work than a week’s worth of weekdays.Report
I got home from the hospital late last night, so just chilling for me. Can’t walk more that a few steps at a time, no lifting over 5lbs etc. Two months of healing, and then PT. Oh. Joy.Report
Glad you’re home. Hang in there. I was once laid up after surgery for a few weeks and I found the only thing that helped was totally embracing the slackitude. “I am going to be the LAZIEST recuperator (other than the needed PT) *evarrrrrrrrrrrrrr* sort of thing. I actually got really into it after a few days. I can’t do anything! I must lie around and read and sew and watch TV!
But that was back when my default state was “only responsible adult in the house even though I am fifteen and both of my parents live here” so maybe I would be a bit less gleeful these days….
In any case, good luck!Report
I keep saying this, but thank you @maribou ! I have stacks of books to read (The Kaisers Missions to Kabul, the Painted Vail, The Citadel of the Autarch and others) I have lined up some TV that looks interesting (Bosch, more Pinky Blinders) and am starting to obsess over Roman inventions and ruins (the Portum, Lake Nemi) so I should be OK, even without sewing 😉Report
Glad things went well. Looking forward to getting together again once you’re up and about. (Fortunately, beer bottles weigh less than one pound.)Report
Glad you’re home in one piece.
Don’t you think it’s odd that the medical establishment calls medieval torture “PT”?Report
The first Skype call with my 87-year-old mother worked fine today, with my sister there to finish the installation. Tomorrow we try it with three participants. Then figure out a regularly scheduled time for calls, and gently pressure more of the widely-scattered family to join in. My mom’s generation wants to see her great-granddaughter from time to time — I’m the one that will be stuck with convincing my daughter to do it.
At least today, the quality was outstanding — nary a video or audio glitch, and the latency wasn’t that much worse than some cell-phone to cell-phone calls.Report
I suppose I should add, shoveling snow. I enjoy shoveling snow, which is a good thing, given how much time I’ve spent at it over the years. There’s the instant gratification part. And there’s even the competitive part, when you finish shoveling by hand faster than your neighbor can finish with his puny snow blower. Of course, when the neighbor opens the garage door and comes out with the new 15 HP three-stage blower, you don’t try to compete, you settle for the smug “I’m more environmentally friendly than that monstrosity.”Report