November 2005

My usual online classes are ten to twelve students. My class starting tonight? Twenty-one. I’m going to set it up a little differently than usualy, given the large number of students. If a lot don’t drop out, I’m going to have to do a few things — like my jury simulation — a lot differently. There’s no rule saying a jury has to have twelve people, but that’s the most common number and also a manageable one.

Twenty-one students. Yikes. And the tech geeks at University of Phoenix haven’t set up my classroom for me yet and I should be watching the Colts and the Steelers on Monday Night Football instead of worrying about my class. Gripe, gripe, gripe…

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On September 27, I pessimistically predicted that the Philadelphia Eagles would guarantee a losing season for the Green Bay Packers, and the Packers would finish the season 4-12. The first half of that prediction has now come true. Green Bay is currently 2-9, along with the Jets and the 49ers. The only team with a worse record is Houston.

Sheesh. Even the New Orleans San Antonio Los Angeles Baton Rouge Saints, the Arizona Cardinals, and the Flaming Thumbtacks of Nashville have managed to eke out three victories each. We lost to Philadelphia’s second string. Next up: the amazingly unstoppable-looking Chicago Bears. We may have to wind up getting our remaining two victories from Detroit and Seattle.

Yes, Seattle. The last game of the season will be on New Year’s Day. By then, it appears that Seattle will have already locked up home-field advantage before their final game. So, the Seahawks will have no particular incentive to play any of their starters for very long and they will mail in their last game in preparation for the playoffs. You heard it here (well, actually you read it here) first.

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It’s not the most pleasant thought in my mind, to return to work after a long, pleasant weekend. A big meal, off of which The Wife and I ate for two days and of which there is still a little bit more to go; lazy days watching movies and goofing off on the computer; and today, visiting my relative and taking a good 2.1 mile walk on an unusually warm November day. A good weekend.

I’m not expecting a good week at work. The Great Man is supposed to be trying a case; whether this will actually happen or not is a very good question. In all of my previous jobs as an attorney, the end grew near when I felt a sense of foreboding and anxiety as I approached my workplace, and a sense of frustration and impotence when actually there, as though nothing I did mattered to anyone. For a long time, I didn’t have that back at my own firm, but I’ve sure got it now at The Law Office Of The Great Man.

It is evident to me that my contributions to the firm are not so much wanted and appreciated as they are tolerated, at least until something or someone more suitable for The Great Man’s purposes comes along. And that may not be the case for much longer anyway. I’m reasonably certain that, having decided to relocate his office to space he unwisely rented in West Knoxville a couple years ago, I will not be making that move. So maybe I have until January 31, 2006. Maybe less. In any event, I admit I’ve not tried very hard to conceal my attitude of doom and gloom at the office and I will probably not be able to do so even if I were to want to. You walk around with a noose around your neck long enough, it’ll start to affect your attitude as well.

Well, on the plus side, my fantasy football team has done pretty well again this weekend; so that’s a plus. The Flying Spaghetti Monsters have been in the lead for nine straight weeks now and there’s five weeks left in the regular season. I have cause to be optimistic there. It may be sad to think that I’ve only got fantasy football to look forward to, and the fact is that I don’t. The apparently inevitable job switch will inevitably result in me being more happy than I am, although I do not relish the thought of going through that very much. The new house will be good, too. I am looking forward to that. I’ve got The Wife and our critters around me, we’ve made some friends here in Tennessee, and if worse comes to worse there is an option in California to fall back on.

I need to remember that I do have options and I don’t have to put up with mind f*cks. I need to remember that I am a good lawyer and I will be an asset to whatever firm or employer winds up realizing that; while The Great Man seems to have lost sight of that fact, others will not. And, of course, I need to remember that I’ve got a great support network of people around me. So when I tell myself that it’s not so bad as I fear tomorrow, on my way in to the office, I should believe it and take the whole situation with a grain of salt and a sense of humor — gallows humor, perhaps, but humor nonetheless.

The real test, of course, is not what I write tonight but what actually happens tomorrow.

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The Wife and I will sometimes have Pajama Day. This can only happen on the weekends and we do it when we’re just too damn lazy to do anything all day long. We hang out and read and watch TV and goof off in our pajamas all day long. Today’s Pajama Day will be punctuated by a pizza delivery. Yes, it’s that pizza named after a board game with moveable pieces that isn’t really very good, but that’s the only place that will delivery out here to The Estate At Louisville and we’ve both had quite enough Thanksgiving leftovers for the time being, thank you very much. But the point of Pajama Day is to just relax, enjoy ourselves, and not have to stress for a while. I defeated that purpose by teaching today, and The Wife did some studying, but aside from that, we’ve been able to cool out pretty good. I played Civ IV, at least until the computer crashed; we watched Miller’s Crossing on DVD, we played with the dogs and cats, and now we’ll just eat pizza and relax. We’ll have plenty of work to do in the upcoming weeks and months.

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Today, I spent most of the day teaching. The most tedious part of being an online instructor is grading papers. What makes this process so tedious is the very, very poor quality of the writing I see. Today’s crop of papers was unusually awful. Misused apostrophes and commas were just the beginning. Incomplete sentences, homophones, and inchoate words strung together as if they meant something. Citations to authority were virtually absent and I found two instances of out-and-out plagiarism which I will have to report to Academic Affairs. Grading papers took me more than five hours and I felt more like a grammar instructor than a law teacher.

Props to the first commenter who can figure out why I posted this particular picture for this particular topic.

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I’ve never cooked a full Thanksgiving meal before, and now that I’ve been the captain of such a ship, I realize that I never will. The project is simply too big for one person to undertake. In this case, The Wife helped out by making her carrot soufflé (not a true soufflé, because it doesn’t have eggs, but don’t tell her that) and a pumpkin pie; Pam and Andrew brought over Pam’s Yams and spiced apple cider.

That left for me, the green bean casserole (with hand-fried onions), the mashed potatoes, an apple-cranberry pie with walnut topping, the stuffing, the cranberry-orange sauce, and… something else. Oh, yes. The bird (and his gravy). I’m pretty proud of myself; the only things not made from scratch were the pie shell, the stuffing, and the gravy base. As to the gravy, the bird was only a breast, so I knew he wasn’t going to make enough drippings for meaningful gravy; I used such drippings as he gave to the gravy and made it super-tasty. What with the instant stuffing being so cheap, I didn’t feel bad about that, and the same with the pie shell.

The bird is the biggest challenge of a Thanksgiving dinner. My bird got to sit in lemon-garlic brine for two and a half days while he thawed out from the freezer; he got dressed with garlic and herbs and cooked under a couple strips of bacon for fat and moisture and as a result, he came out really moist and juicy.

None of the individual dishes are very difficult, including the bird. What’s complex and challenging is the extent of the prep work involved, and then timing everything to be ready at more or less the same time. The Wife and I got the sauce and the pies ready the night before, and everything else I sat down and mapped out on a spreadsheet schedule so I would know when everything needed to start and finish. The result was an on-time dinner, with everything hot and fresh and yummy. Pam, Andrew, the Wife, and I ate our fill of plentiful, delicious, all-American food, and when we were hungry again, we ate pie. And while Thanksgiving food is super-yummy, it is also kind of high-fat and you can’t make a constant habit out of eating like that. Andrew got so much turkey and wine in him he had to take a nap. When I saw that, I pronounced the dinner a great success.

I particularly enjoyed our toasts to what we were thankful for and to me that was one of the high points of the night. It’s nice to know that we are all grateful for the same things — most of all for the people we love, and for the opportunities and the bounty we can enjoy in our lives, and for our freedom and our friends. To my former law partner and all his colleagues serving overseas, we took time to remember you — and while we toasted you with wine and not water, you were in our thoughts.

Overall, it was great fun and I would gladly do it again. Just not tomorrow night; I need a rest. All-told, I probably spent nine to ten hours prepping, cooking and cleaning — especially cleaning. We had to run our itty-bitty dishwasher four times that day and it felt like I spent more time cleaning dirty dishes and putting clean ones away than I spent handling food and making it ready. My feet and back were pretty sore by the end of the day and I must have slept for ten hours last night. But it was great and a reminder of why the Thanksgiving feast is such a great American tradition.

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Michael Reynolds, the George Carlin of political bloggers, has apparently re-activated his highly amusing and often inspirational rant sheet. I guess Congressman John Murtha’s recent declarations about the war, and the White House’s response, really pissed him off.

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I resigned my duties as manager of the firm yesterday night. I’m not entirely sure how The Great Man really feels about that; he was very sedate in a staff meeting to discuss it and he seemed to grievously misunderstand the reasons why I did it despite having made myself as clear as I possibly could.

I say “not entirely sure.” But that doesn’t mean I don’t have an educated guess. With The Great Man’s recent obsession with overhead, his avowed desire to “slow down” and have a smaller office, his past expressions of resentment of my insistence that I be paid for my work in the form of money, his previous disdain for the management decisions that I did make, his refusal to take my advice for how to change things, and the recent fireworks regarding the handling of a vendor and a personnel issue, I have a pretty clear vision of what my future at The Law Offices Of The Great Man looks like:

And just after agreeing to buy a house, too — this comes right at a time when I need financial stability more than ever. But I don’t think I had a choice to do anything but what I did, and even if I hadn’t, something tells me the result would have been the same anyway. At least this way, I can hold my head high and feel like I did the right thing on the way down. That won’t feed my family or pay my mortgage, but then again, that would have been the inevitable result anyway. So it’s high time I update my C/V.

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Sometimes I agree with Charles Krauthammer, sometimes I do not. Friday in the Washington Post, he was as eminently sensible as I can ever remember him being.

And yes, this is an old saw for me. But it’s important. Either we’re going to teach our children science or we’re going to teach them theology. It’s high time that America walks through that ivory door and rejoins the twenty-first century.

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