Tales from the Shark Tank

Ladies and gentlebeings, the vote is in. The new computer’s name is officially “Nimue”. Joseph is very proud of having named Mommy’s computer. It seems also to have had the effect of convincing him to be very, very careful of it. A machine he doesn’t worry too much over, but anything with an actual name by definition has feelings, and can be hurt.

For some months, I have been advising my client in my juvenile case to be patient. Her religion seems to be behind all the shenanigans of child protection, but up until now they’d handled it in a fashion that made it seem at least plausible. I kept telling her to wait; pushed hard enough, resisted long enough, they’d eventually be forced to show their hand.

Now they have. We have the Reunification Plan, which is basically the written document of what my client needs to do to get her children back. It includes sending the children to Bible School. The family is not Christian, the department knows they are not Christian, and the judge (who hasn’t seen this yet) knows it. The judge will be utterly unamused; I know her. The ICLU will be even less so. They’ve finally put it in writing.

They’re mine.

Color me happy. I went for a swim and dip in a hot tub with Li the other day. In the course of that, I concluded that my swimsuit was rather larger than I now need. It was all the better, because the suit in question is the one I pulled out when I shrank out of the one I wore when I first began to really work out. So today I went shopping, looking for a suit one size smaller in the clearance racks.

There wasn’t one that size; best I could do was two sizes smaller. I looked at the suit. I thought about how the one I was replacing had looked, and decided to give it a try. Lo and behold, it fit very nicely indeed. I knew I felt a lot better in this body, but didn’t know the change had manifested itself in a way I could measure externally. Go, me!

I’ve just showed my dad this computer. Yep, I’m writing on the new laptop. He is much impressed. He played with computers pretty near from their infancy until his retirement, programming them at a time when they occupied an entire building, required a specially chilled room and did less than a modern five buck calculator in a blister pack. And now I’m sitting here on the back porch at my folk’s house, no electric outlet in sight, typing away at a computer sitting in my lap. Dad is 74. He grew up reading the pulps. From his point of view, it’s the stuff of science fiction come to life. Of course, he also wants one. I’m checking to see what I can do about that. I’ll get him a desktop, though. A 17-inch monitor is much easier on older eyes.

From my point of view? I can bring my son to visit his grandparents even when I want to blog, or work, or just write e-mail. I don’t have to drive back home (half an hour each way) to get back to my files, desk, computer, etc. I’m not tied down. I can sit out on the porch with my son instead of making him stay inside until I finish with my obligations. Multi-tasking? Sure. Would it be better if I didn’t have to? Probably. But the alternative is to be stuck inside. Me, I’ll take the technology.

The judge has taken care of the problem of obtaining a signature from a dead woman. He 1. set aside the default judgment that happened while she was busy dying and 2. ordered the idiots to conduct business with me through their attorney and only through their attorney. He also heard the story of the phone debacle, and asked if I had really suggested use of a oijia board. Judges seldom permit themselves to laugh out loud, but this one did. I was pleased. Nay, I was smug. For their idiocy, the plaintiff has lost the club of having the judgment and been sent back to Square One. Woo Hoo!

But overshadowing that is the arrival of my new laptop! (I know, Rana, you warned me about Compaqs. This is a case of “bird in hand”, though.) I now have a Compaq Armada Pentium III with sufficient hard drive and RAM not to become constipated over dealing with the internet. It also has a built in ethernet card, although I have to figure out how to make that work. Hey, I’ll get there. I’m still getting my baby set up. She’s also got a big enough screen to be easy on middle-aged eyes….wish I didn’t need it, but there it is. I’ve been bouncing since her arrival. At last, a computer that’s all mine, that I won’t find anything mysterious loaded on.

Now, every baby should have a name, right? I’m leaning toward “Jabberwocky”. My son likes “Nimue”. (I’ve been reading him a children’s version of the King Arthur tales.) I don’t think the computer much cares. Anyone who would like to is welcome to cast a vote or make an alternate suggestion.

Meanwhile, I’m going to go find my way through the wonders of my new toy some more. And you, gentle readers, now know the reasons for the shrieks of glee emanating from this location.

Indiana has more “Green” than you can shake the proverbial stick at. This doesn’t refer to the abundance of verdure that will overtake human construction at the slightest opportunity, although certainly there’s plenty of that. It refers to the collection of locations with “Green” somewhere in the appelations. There’s Greene County, Greenwood, Greentown, Greensburg, and Greenfield, all within an hour’s drive of Indianapolis. Greenfield, the county seat of the next county east, is where I was today.

It’s only 20 miles from Indy, and it’s another world. There is no metal detector at the courthouse door. There’s no sign forbiding instruments of mayhem. The only admonition is against smoking. I went into three different offices (the clerk and two courts), and everyone was as helpful and friendly as if they’d been transplanted from Mayberry. There was a sign in one court that said that court staff would no longer perform secretarial services for private parties. When I paused to read it, the clerk told me very apologetically that local attorneys had been asking them to “just run up this one thing” [that they'd forgotten] and that it had gotten out of hand. “And their offices are right around the corner, mostly, so it isn’t hard for them to get something. But if you forgot something, I’ll be happy to do it for you.” I was stunned, and told the lady she was kind beyond the call of duty. She blushed. (And no, I had no need to take advantage of her kindness. I hadn’t forgotten anything.)

I looked around while I was there. Sometime in the recent past accoustical ceiling tile had been installed. Since the ceiling was still a good 15 feet up, I have to wonder how high the ceilings were before the suspended tiles were put up there. Everywhere I looked, the walls and floors were edged and ornamented with carved limestone. It’s a beautiful melding of 19th century elegance and more modern technology. The crowning glory? At the foot of the main staircase (broad, spotlessly clean white marble) is a pair of lights. Their configuration makes it abundantly clear that when they were installed, they were wrought iron gas lights. When I first saw that courthouse, about 20 years ago, they were ornamental, but no longer provided illumination. When the courthouse was refurbished, they were not replaced with something gracelessly modern and practical. They were wired for electricity. Now the central globe is a single huge spherical bulb, and the surrounding crown of flames holds flame-shaped bulbs. The glass is frosted, and glows against the black iron even in daylight when the lights needn’t be turned on. The whole thing is like that. It is beautiful, and cared for, and loved. And no one seems to feel the need for the looming Presence of Security. I wish the other courthouses I have to go into could be like that.

This has been quite a day. I got Joseph on the school bus at the proper time. That was just about the last thing that went according to plan. Two things, however, were particularly noteworthy.

One was the airport parking lot. Wick had agreed to pick up friends coming in for GenCon. Then, as it turned out, he had to work. Ok, I know these folks too, so I agreed to go. Dragon Frankie and I arrived there in due course. I then attempted to park in the short term garage.

Guess what? In order to prevent terrorists from driving truck bombs in close to the building, they reset the clearance at the entrance at 5′ 4 ” . By the time you find out about this, of course, there is no way to go back. You have to go forward. I didn’t expect a problem, though. I mean, I drive the current equivalent of a station wagon, right? The ultimate mom-mobile, more common on the roads these days than just about anything else. Surely those bars are meant for full size pick ups or vans, SUVs and the like. Wrong. I have scrape marks on my roof, and the roof-rack that comes with a minivan is now an ex roof rack. And of course, coming out they have the same damn bars at the other end. More scrapes. At least it couldn’t break off the roof rack again. It was already gone, and rejoicing in the back of the van. No great loss, really; if I haven’t needed a roof rack by now, I doubt I’m going to any time in the foreseeable future.

Ok, I parked in the outside lot, retrieved friends, dropped them at their hotel, and got something filed in Federal court.

Then came The Phone Call. I’ve been trying valiantly to deal with a mortgage company that is staffed by people with a collective IQ somewhere around that of a fossilized newt on behalf of a client. I had called their attorney, who indicated that their client wanted to negotiate with me directly. Ok, fine. I called them. We need a written consent from the borrower to speak to you, said the representative. I explained that I could not give them that because the case is an estate, and the borrower is dead. But they can’t talk to me without written consent from Mrs. S., they repeated. I said fine, I would fax a copy of the letters testamentary. No, says the rep; it has to be signed by Mrs. S.. By that point I was wishing to reach through the phone and shake the twit. I asked if he was proficient with a ouija board. No? Then I needed to speak to his supervisor.

She, too, would give a box of rocks serious competition. Same deal. Has to be from Mrs. S.. Not me, not her daughter, herself. By that point I said something like “Do you understand? The borrower is in a casket. She is providing fertilizer for grass. She is deceased. Dead. No longer breathing. I can not get her signature!” Well, she was very sorry, but that was the regulation and she saw no reason for me to be mean about it. Fine, I said, I would let the judge deal with it and hung up. Then I called their attorney back and told her about it. She was utterly boggled. She said she’d try to break the impasse. That was before 9:00 this morning. I haven’t heard back from her yet. I do hope her clients haven’t reproduced. They bode ill for the gene pool.

For a while, it seemed that every time I picked up a magazine there was at least one article singing the praises of working from home while staying with the kids and explaining just how simple it was to set up.

The folks who wrote those articles can’t have tried it. They have not had trains rained upon their unsuspecting heads, nor been bombarded with “Mommy, I want you to be done NOW. Maybe a mother who is better at saying “out of my office” can carry it off, but then how does that constitute being “home for your kids”?

Me? I’m asking a bankruptcy court for a 48 hour extension, because I couldn’t get it all done before Joseph came home from school today, it’s due tomorrow, and tomorrow is already full to the gills. Supermom may be out there somewhere in magazine land, but I am decidedly not she.

Joseph started first grade today. Last night he made like it was no big deal, but for all that, he woke up shouting for Mommy no less than 4 times. Each time I went in to him, patted him and tucked him back in. He went back to sleep in seconds, once he’d seen me. The fifth time, he didn’t call. He simply walked in, climbed into our bed, pulled my arms around himself and went to sleep. This morning he was ready to rock. I, on the other hand, was a bit of a zombie.

That did not stop me from taking him to school, as he wished. You could tell the parents with first graders standing by the school door. They were the ones whose kids alternated between dancing around, tugging on parental hands, and hiding against their accompanying adult. Believe me, I was not the only one to take my kid for his first day. There were so many of us signing our kids in I wondered if any first graders actually came on the bus this morning. Certainly Joseph didn’t stand out in the crowd.

I’m glad I didn’t just put him on the bus, though. He was an element in the set of children who said not a single word and maintained a death grip on the available parental hand. I was glad my wedding ring has no rough edges, as tightly as he was hanging on. He answered a question about who his teacher would be in a whisper addressed to his sneakers, and just looked up at another parent who tried to be friendly. Only one poor soul got any verbal response at all. That was a grandmotherly type who tried to joke him into talking. He fixed her with his best steely gaze (and for six, it’s pretty good) and said “My mommy is right here. Her name is Alisa Cohen.” Then he looked down at his shoes again. When she looked at me my response was “Well, I think that constitutes an introduction. What grade is she in?” with a nod to the girl beside her. Joseph relaxed once he was no longer the subject of scrutiny.

So we got into the building, with him still talking to his shoes any time anyone asked him a question. That lasted until we actually got to his teacher. Once he saw her, and she pointed him to a table, all was well. He took off his backpack, turned around to give me a hug and a kiss, told me “Bye, Mommy! Have a happy day!” and sat down in his seat. I looked back from the door. He didn’t notice. He was already engrossed in a book.

I’ve checked my e-mail several times today, as I have some things out on which I’m expecting responses. I’ve gotten a whole lot of new stuff in my e-mail boxes, all right. The problem? Every single piece has been some form of spam. They’re trying to sell me Viagra. Or Canadian drugs. Or give me a “free” laptop if I’ll just sign up for whatever it is they’re selling. Whatever else that computer was, I am quite certain it was not going to be free. I lost track of the number of assorted “deals” I was being offered.

Then there’s the Russian spam, in Cyrillic letters no less. I’ve never bothered with more than the first sentence, but it looks a whole lot like the Deposed Nigerian Financial Officer scam. I’m also getting spammed in German, French, and a couple of languages I can identify only as generically oriental. How in Hades did these folks even get my e-mail address? On the other hand, I suppose I’m glad they aren’t filling up my tangible mail box, cluttering my trash cans, and killing trees to create that volume of paper. There are worse things to have to do than hit “shift-delete”.

There is one thing I’m grateful for. By some magic of filters, WordPress causes spam-type blog comments to be blocked and sent to my e-mail for moderation. I can delete them before they ever his the point of disturbing my kind readers. I also don’t have to rebuild my entire blog every time I delete something. That is a great and good thing. The more I use it, the more I like WordPress. Thanks, Dorothea. I know it was a pain in the patoot to set up, but you done good, Lady.

I have an estate to submit for probate, for which I am preparing the preliminary documents. Before I do that, though, I’m reading through assorted sections of the code to catch up on what’s been changed since the last time I did this. To call it tedious would be an understatement. Believe me, if legislative drafters were novelists, they’d starve very quickly. It’s also, like much legislation, unnecessarily convoluted. Some of this stuff would make Bulwar-Litton contest entries look like paragons of clarity and simplicity by comparison.

So the occasional distraction is not amiss, if only to keep myself focused and awake. But I just realized I’ve found an excuse to Google something or other three times in the last 20 minutes. That’s a bit much, even for something as deadly dull as this. It’s also so classically geeky I’m laughing at myself.