My hands don't make an oar shape lately. I've forgotten what bait smells like. I owe a seafood favor to someone and will have to acquire the goods elsewhere and then hope they stay frozen and TSA personnel don't confiscate them for looking like a menace to air travel. I guess St. Croix USVI is a hard location to ship fresh lobsters or shrimp to.
I finished an interior job and started a chainsaw project yesterday. Formidable as is the Stihl 211, I felt like one termite in a very large forest of tangled and blown down spruce trees. Taking a break, I looked across Matinicus Roads, past Ten Pound Island and the Hogshead. All the outlying ledges and islets were sharp white against a blue black ocean. Everything else in every direction was gray, so the black blue and white had a glow of their own, appearing hemispheres removed from the way the area looks in summer. We are Spitsbergen and a summer island paradise depending on the calendar.
I've also been working the sit muscles pretty hard and going back to law school in a manner of speaking. I've started legal research work. I was never the legal analyst, so this is a good chance to fill some gaps in my education. Lots and lots of screen time and ass time only broken by feeding the stove and school children.
That's the beauty and the peril of this life. I'm able to do a bunch of really different things as long as I don't mind being cold, inhaling urethane fumes, dodging falling trees and hardest of all, using my brain while sitting still. As long as I don't mind always being half a step ahead of delinquency notices and calls from customer service professionals who may monitor my call for training and quality assurance.
So today, the snow was whipping and my sinuses pretty well malfunctioning and I decided not to flog myself. What a luxury. I've had many years of dragging myself through court, correctional facilities, sterns of commercial fishing vessels and school while very much under the weather.
On one occasion, I was scheduled to be in front of a superior court justice who is now a federal prosecutor. I was scheduled to be in 2 courts at the same time, which is a fact of life for criminal defense counsel. I was sick as a dog, but apparently indispensible to the justice system and sorely missed by Delahanty. Neither court would accommodate the other, so I went to one and then the other. The judge called me to his office and assembled an audience to watch the verbal horsewhipping. I knew full well that on docket days there is infinite flex in the schedule and that no business made my presence a critical requirement. I guess he had a bad day, for which I feel long term gratitude because I decided that day to stop taking those kinds of cases where I wound up broke with holes in my shoes and a sour disposition. Thanks for helping me along the way, your honor.
We have time for our kids, mindless media entertainment and mid week jammy days. We make up for it the other 11 months. Like Lisa says, this is what January is for.
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