Christmas gifts

All I really wanted this year was to have my family - the six of us - home safe for a few days. We got that, and it was great, especially with our son's fiancee joining the crowd. Next year will be different, naturally, but this year was one to remember.

Our kids gave us a special gift for Christmas - they cleaned out and reorganized our garage. To understand the significance of that, understand that a typical Florida house has no basement and no attic. The garage becomes the attic. After nineteen years in the same house the garage collects a ton of stuff, to be polite, or crap, to be honest. It is our stuff, my parents' stuff, our kids' stuff - and it propagates in the middle of the night. We haven't had room for a car in the garage in more than a decade. To do this job they had to haul it all out into the driveway, add new shelves, put some of it back, and throw some of it out. They did it all in one day. Our job was to stay out of the way and not interfere.

So, in this strange bloggie diary that is open for the world to see, I want to proclaim that we have the greatest kids any parent could hope for. "Kids" is no longer the right word for these adults, but no matter how old we get they will be our children and we love them unconditionally.

notes from Atlanta

Yesterday I was in Atlanta, defending my city in the federal court of appeals. I won't bore you with the details but it was a building demolition case. The district court judge in Tampa ruled in favor of the city and we were defending his decision. To be there bright and early, I stayed overnight at the HoJo hotel downtown on Peachtree Street (of course), across from the Marta station and the entrance to Underground Atlanta. From there, you can walk one way to the courthouse and the other way to the hotel. An Atlanta taxi driver once told me Atlanta has seventeen Peachtrees - streets, avenues, boulevards, etc. I didn't take the taxi this time, though. Marta runs a nice train right downtown to Five Points, where the east-west line and the north-south line intersect.

The courthouse is a wonderful old federal office building. The courtroom has beautiful panelling on three walls with one wall of windows to brighten the place up. Everything about it oozes of proper courtroom dignity and legal majesty, like it ought to. The three judges hearing the arguments that morning (mine was the fourth and final case) had obviously studied everything in the files and were armed with pointed questions. You can never tell how the case is going by their questions - a "hostile" question might be intended to clear up a point before they rule in your favor, and a "friendly" question might spring a trap. You can plan on maybe a few minutes of speaking time before the questions begin. The last time I was there they gave me time to clear my throat before pouncing on me, and they just about beat me to death. We lost that one. This time I felt like the tide was running in our favor. Being in that beautiful courtroom, all dressed up like a lawyer, answering questions like hitting tennis balls back over the net, was a much more satisfying experience this time. How the case will turn out is anybody's guess, though. Never bet your lunch money on how people who wear black robes for a living might decide a case. If I could predict the outcome of cases I'd make my living at the race track. Ask me in six months if we have a decision yet and I'll tell you how it went.

catching up

It has been a quiet week, except for the national, perhaps international, news of the family in Orlando (why do these stories always come out of Florida?) where the parents are "on strike." Lemme see. . .the kids didn't pitch in with chores, so Mom and Dad are sleeping in a tent on their driveway. The kids have the run of the house, and what passes for winter in Florida is arriving. Who is winning, here? This morning the paper ran photos of their messy bedrooms. Messy? I can see most of the floors. What's the problem? When our kids were growing up, we had some high priorities, like school work. They did their own laundry and fixed their own lunches for school, or suffered the consequences. But the bedroom mess was not our problem. We could always shut the doors, and we often did. As long as we didn't smell smoke, no problemo. As long as kept their school work up, no problemo.

Did that work? Well, let's add it up. Four kids. Four high school diplomas, four National Honor Society memberships. Four bachelors' degrees, two masters' degrees. One additional degree to become a Registered Nurse. Nobody got a degree for keeping a clean room. Four well-adjusted, happy, productive young adults living in Boston, Boulder, and San Francisco. If anybody is in therapy or having a drug or drinking problem, they haven't told me about it. They grew up loving and respecting each other, their parents, and their large extended family of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Their mother did an excellent job of raising them. There were times when she thought about going on strike against me but, fortunately, we don't have a tent large enough for the mattress, air conditioner, refrigerator, TV, and sewing machine.

light bulbs

I had one of those fifteen minute projects that kills an afternoon this afternoon, the consequence of living in a house wired by a drunken handyman (a former owner, not me). The task was to replace burned-out exterior light bulbs in the side yards, rear yard, and over the pool deck. Aaaargh.

An understanding of the wiring and switches is critical to understanding how I took too long with this job: The switch for an exterior light at the NW corner of the house, shining down the side yard, is in the garage. The switch for the light at the NE corner of the house is in the living room. The same switch, in the living room, controls a light over the pool deck. There is another light, just outside the door leading in from the pool deck, controlled by a switch just inside that door. (That bulb, thankfully, was working and is not part of this tale.) There are actually two switches just inside the door from the pool deck; the other one controls the light in the rear yard. That's four switches, five lights. (I'm not even counting the light in the garage that blew during my labors, requiring me to change that bulb also.)

The light at the NW corner of the house has been burned out for so long that I forgot which switch controls it, and I assumed it was the switch in the living room. The light over the pool deck and the light over the door leading in from the pool deck are so close together that, when you don't have to change a bulb for several years, you tend to forget which switch is which - you flip a switch and there's light out there. This is sort of like walking and chewing gum; you tend not to give such things serious thought. To compound the situation, the light at the NE corner of the house won't come on after changing the bulbs, regardless of which switch you play with (but I know it is the switch in the living room). All of this left me stalking back and forth, inside and out, up and down ladders, flipping the wrong switches and wondering why there was no light.

The score, after taking entirely too long, is now 4 for me, 1 for the lights. Four lights work, one will not. If I also count the light inside the garage, the score is actually 5 to 1. But I am not done until I get the light at the NE corner working.

And I haven't even started putting up the Christmas lights yet.

moving day

Today, I moved my office. Actually, it began on Wednesday but I finished today. I moved all the way to. . .the room next door, but it may as well been across town for all of the hassles involved.

It is amazing what accumulates after four and a half years in the same room. Books in boxes (I have more shelf space in the new room), a lot of ring binders (some empty), files (only I understand the system), and stacks and stacks of paper. In a government office, paper flows in and in, sometimes out. You see something and think, I want to read this, and you set it aside with other stuff to read. Or you get quarter-final and semi-final drafts of various documents. You get maps. You get meeting agendas. They all end up in stacks on a corner of your desk, on a table, on the floor, on top of a file cabinet, wherever. Eventually they threaten to fall on somebody or catch fire through spontaneous combustion.

I jumped at the chance to change rooms in order to force myself to engage in some serioius TCO (Throw Crap Out). Now I have everything in a state of temporary pandemonium, but at least my computer works again. I irritated our ICS people by moving my computer myself. They think that's a job only they can do. Any fool can take a computer apart and put it back together; I can. Those stacks are sitting on two long window ledges where I cannot ignore them. I am going to engage in TCO until the window ledges have nothing but potted plants and maybe a couple of photos. And that's my New Year's Resolution for myself, a month early.

two kinds

In my last note to myself and my faithful readers (all four of you), I said there are two kinds of chess players.

Sheesh! What a trite cliche (or is that redundant?)!

There are two kinds of people - those who divide people and things into categories, and those who don't.

There are three kinds of people - those who can count, and those who can't.

There are 10 kinds of people - those who can count in binary, and those who can't.

This goes on and on - but enough!