All Things Profane and Sacred

Last week I was thinking that this week would be busy and hellish, but several of my more time consuming cases settled or got otherwise resolved without a lot of effort on my end (joy for me, joy for my clients). So, it's been quiet around here for a change, which gives me a nice chance to clean out my paperwork strewn office, catch up on my reading and get my files organized.


I'm ready to be done at 10 am, but I can't leave the poverty stricken people of the world over the weekend, so here I am.

Our struggle with the cars continues. We have J's 30 year old Mercedes, which needs shocks quite badly and probably won't start come winter, our new (to us) $500 Mercedes, which sucks gas and just needs some rust management work before we sell it, our Toyota, which needs, among other things, an exhaust manifold before winter.

We're hoping to finish up work on the new to us Mercedes by the end of next month. We have someone who will trade us some cash and another Toyota for the gas guzzling Mercedes. That way we would have two reliable winter cars and the ability to pull the old green gal off the road until we can give her some TLC.

And we finally got rid of J's stupid Nissa Stanza. It is a long tale, the finishment of that old money sucking whore. It was broke down in our driveway for the last 6 months. We finally got it running when a desparate friend needed to buy a piece of shit car. We were set to drive it up to Salem and to collect our $ when the damn thing blew a gasket. We babied it back to a parking lot, and moved it every few days while we tried to figure out whether to fix it and sell it (Js desire) or to junk it (mine). NPR refused it as a 'donation' and the junk yard refused to come out and pick it up, so we wearily decided to take it in, fix it and then sell it. Of course, upon deciding this, another part exploded in the sun, so we had to cajole, then threaten the junk yard. And faced with the possibility of losing our copious business, they relented and hauled the hose beast to its final resting place.

I fixed my toilet with dental floss. The end of the arm that the chain that the little stopper thing is attached to rusted off. So, we couldn't flush without reaching into the back of the toilet and fishing out the chain. So I attached the chain to a piece of dental floss and attached the other end of the dental floss to the wall with a tack. Now you can flush by just pulling the dental floss. Voila.

One of the nice things about living on the mountain is having real darkness at night. This weekend, we got up at 2 am Sunday to watch the meteor shower. We must have picked exactly the right time, because at about 4 am the clouds rolled in and our stars were gone.

The weather has been beautiful; court and paperwork are not at the top of my priority list. Is there anything more sinful than a public service attorney home at 2 pm for a nap in the shade of an apple tree? Our green apples are turning pink in the sun and are almost sweet enough to harvest. Our adopted deer-the guy who was with mom last winter, but is now a swinging batchelor with fuzzy spikes-is pretty happy with the food supply. He no longer fears the dogs, so long as they are inside the only thing on his mind is procuring more delicious fruit. We have a full supply of pesto and lemonade and are ready for the weekend to start.

I don't know as that I can force myself to work all day today, even though I went home early yesterday. Luckily, this is pow wow weekend, so I can count hanging out and stuffing myself with fry bread as work time. Maybe I should go do that.