Yawn ...

Man, am I tired.

We didn't get a weekend this week, not really anyway. My mother-in-law's mother, Grandma C, fell and broke her hip and we drove to Spokane to see her. While Grandma C is recuperating in a facility in Spokane, her daughter (my mother in law) has decided that it is high time to clean her house. Like a lot of elderly folks, Grandma C is a pack rat. She never throws away anything and she has a bad habit of buying dolls/coins/etc off the TV, from magazine ads, and any other source of cheap crap. The problem is that the various items she buys, from her limited income, are marketed as collectibles that will only increase in value when; in fact, the only thing they collect is dust. I swear that these companies must consciously prey on unsophisticated consumers like Grandma C who are suckered into buying this junk as a form of investment; people who prey on weak consumers should be dragged out and shot. Anyway, as a result of her weakness for these sales pitches, and her inability to let things go, her four bedroom house has only one usable room and floor space is a rare commodity. Thus, there will be a few long months of sorting through everything, determining what is pure junk, what is valuable (either emotionally or financially) and giving away (or dumping) the rest. We got a start on Saturday by removing the big items, a 35 year old broken television that must have weighed 100+ lbs, a moldy waterbed, etc … All stuff that, had Grandma C been there, she would not have let us throw out.

With all the driving and working in Grandma C's house, I didn’t really get a chance to recharge this weekend and, as a result, I'm really dragging this week. My work day is just too long, from about 7 – 10. Here is my typical weekday. I get up at 6:00 am and leave the house by about 6:45 to get to work by 7:00, I stay until 4:30 pm, drive home and let the dog out, I then drive to the law school at 5:00 pm to do some last minute preparing for the class I'm taking for the summer, class start's at 6:00 pm and goes until 7:35 or so, then I go home and eat dinner and then read/study until 10:00 pm when I go to bed. Repeat. I can't wait until school starts in the fall so I can take a rest! I shouldn't complain. It is not going to get any easier when I'm actually in practice. Take for example this excerpt from my textbook on Professional Responsibility:

"You will end up billing only about two hours for every three hours that you spend at "work." And thus, to bill 2000 hours per year, you will have to spend about sixty hours per week at the office, and take no more than two weeks vacation/sick time/personal leave. If it takes you, say, forty-five minutes to get to work, and another forty-five minutes to get home, billing 2000 per year will mean leaving home at 7:45 am, working at the office from 8:30 a.m. until 6:30 pm, and then arriving home at 7:15 p.m - and doing this six days per week, every week. That make for long days, and for long weeks, and you will have to work these hours not just for a month or two, but year after year after year" Patrick J. Schiltz, "On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession. Vanderbilt Law Review. 1999.

Good for me that I would rather be overworked than bored.

Anyway, the one respite I have during the week are Wednesdays (because I don't have class on Wednesdays) and this Wednesday (tonight) I'm going to see The Police in concert at the Key. I'm pretty excited (as anyone who walked by my room in Fraternity house and could hear music coming from the room could probably attest) to see them. I heard they sucked in their show up in Vancouver, but here’s to hoping they have the kinks worked out by tonight. I'll post a review tomorrow. Hopefully.