The space where my brain should be hurts

I am at home, having crawled to the end of The Week That Threatened To Kill Me With All The Law And Whatnot. I hate the stress of appearing in court, which makes my career choice pretty poor, when you think about it. (Remind me to tell you about how I chose this career, by the way. It's an uplifting tale.) You may recall that I ran around at the beginning of this week trying to catch up on all the stuff that built up last week when I was in court.

Then, I spent Wednesday preparing for the case due to start on Thursday. I finished my preparations for day one at just after midnight on Wednesday/Thursday. Spent all day Thursday in court, concentrating furiously all day (which tires me out. Thinking is hard.) Worked until about midnight on Thursday again reviewing the first day's evidence, preparing for cross-examination and working on some draft legal submissions (that's the bit at the end of the evidence where we get to tell the judge what we think we have proved and he gets to laugh at us). Got up early this morning to get into the office and print out what I had done last night. So that I could, you know, read it. Some of it even made sense despite having been drafted in that period when your brain turns to cotton wool just before you lose consciousness and fall asleep with your face on your keyboard and wake up with "asdfghjkl;" imprinted on your cheek.

Day two in court went reasonably well, despite the other side changing their mind about their attitude to pretty much the whole case mid-evidence which called for a liberal application of red biro to the carefully crafted pages of cross-examination on which I had worked so hard. We won't get the decision for a wee while but the signs looked positive.

Then, I came home, got changed, picked up husband and children, deposited husband in town to meet a friend and took the bouncing offspring to an up-market burger joint for dinner. I was deaf to their pleas to go to McDonalds. I do have some standards. Full of stodge, we returned home and I have been vegetating pleasantly on the couch since. The wee G&T I had earlier has done its job so I am off for some well earned sleep. Tomorrow I may manage to post something coherent that does not read like a Janet and John book ("Then Janet went out. Then John went out. Then Janet banged her head off the door in frustrated boredom") Night all!

Okay, Life, enough. I get the point

Just to make sure that my smug cheerfulness has been well and truly ground out of me, the weekend finished with the news that our office had been broken into. Fortunately very little damage was done and nothing really serious was taken, like our data files or anything. But they did take what little cash they could find together with what portable items of value were available. Like all the cameras and mobile phones in the building. Oh, and all the laptops, including mine, which would normally be at home with me over the weekend, but wasn't because I had to take the kids to the dentist on Friday so left it in the office rather than cart it to the dental surgery. And one of my colleagues lost her laptop because she was on holiday on Friday and Monday and felt it would be better to leave it in the office. Hah! I get to tell her the good news tomorrow.

My old mobile phone, on the other hand, was deemed unworthy of theft (slightly offended by that, actually) and even more embarassing, my room was a bit tidier after the housebreakers left than it was when I left it on Friday. I had come in from court and chucked my folders and my case of papers into the middle of my floor. The intruders had checked the case for anything valuable, found nothing and tucked it away neatly in the corner. Should I be ashamed of this, do you think?

Luckily there is next to nothing in the way of work-related stuff actually on my laptop itself (we work on a network in the office) but I have spent a slightly irritated day making notes to myself of all the websites I need to go onto to change passwords just in case (Amazon, Paypal, Ebay, Google.....do I spend too much time online???) And now I have to go off and figure out whether I can get the music off my iPod and onto iTunes rather than the other way round. Or I have to start from scratch ripping all my CDs again. Oh joy.

On the plus side, thank you for all the kind offers to look after my angelic children for me! The fact that they all came from the other side of the Atlantic in no way detracts from the level of kindness displayed but does make it a tad unlikely I will be taking you up on them! (However, be very afraid if your phone rings in July - we'll be in Canada then!!)

Pride comes, and all that

Well, you just knew, didn't you, after that last ill-considered post that life would saunter up and smack me in the face with a wet mackerel, a la Monty Python. After Tuesday went so well, Wednesday went....slightly less well, and Thursday reminded me of nothing so much as one of those school playground scraps where all the other kids are in a tight circle around you chanting "Fight! Fight!" only this time when the teacher turned up, instead of breaking it up, she joined in and gave me a good kicking too.

Which is my way of saying that the remaining court action did not go well last week and I felt rotten as a result. It is part of the "joy" of doing litigation for a living, this cut and thrust and the major ups and downs, but Thursday was a bigger down than I have experienced for some time. Counsel (ie the advocate I was instructing) looked so shell-shocked on Thursday afternoon that I had to take him down the road and administer two large cappucinos and a slice of cream cake before he could form coherent sentences. (That's my version of first aid and I'm sticking to it.)

The weekend has given me some much needed recuperation time and a bit of perspective so I should be able to go in on Monday and sweep up the debris. Next week is going to be hectic in a different way. I have a court action in the sheriff court on Thursday and Friday (in the sheriff court it is I who will be in gown and on my feet before the judge, rather than counsel) and I am kind of looking forward to it as the law in this case is not particularly complex and it has been a while since I conducted a hearing myself.

The interesting part of next week and the week after is that I will be relying, like so many parents do year-round, on after school club for childcare. Normally my wonderful parents provide the childcare (and do my kids' laundry, and supervise homework, and feed them, and in the summer my dad cuts my grass for me - I know, I am spoiled) but they are going away. This year is my parents' official retirement (although they are going to continue with their childcare/housekeeping position. I hope) and they are treating themselves to a once-in-a-lifetime trip. They fly out on Thursday to New York where they will join the Queen Mary II and cruise the Caribbean for ten days or so. In their absence, I have booked the boys into after school club which they are frankly overjoyed about. It does mean I will have to make sure I am punctual in picking them up though, so watch this space for tales of mad dashes across Edinburgh when I forget my kids are not in fact at home when I have driven halfway to the house and have to double back to get them.

And just to make my life that much more interesting, on Friday, as I have said, I am in court and I cannot get out of that. The boys' school, however is CLOSED on Friday for Founder's Day (??). And After School Club is not operating. I am therefore checking out whether the local Cattery will stretch a point and take children. It's just for one day, after all.

Smuggity smug

I am feeling quietly pleased with myself at the moment. I managed to get up at 6am this morning (or rather, Husband managed to get me up but I got dressed all by myself!) and I went out for a run for the first time in ages. I forced myself because I knew I was going to be stuck in court all day, and probably all week, so no lunchtime outings. In fact, no lunchtimes, so it was mornings or nothing.

Out I went into the cold dark misty frostiness and it was really good. I ran well, even if I do say so myself, considering I have not run properly for a good long while. I managed a whole 36 minutes WITHOUT STOPPING TO WALK AT ALL and I even added on an extra bit to my route to incorporate a voluntary hill. I was listening to my iPod having downloaded an album by Tones on Tail, the band formed from the rump of Goth masters Bauhaus when they split and it turned out to be splendid running music. If you like the kind of music my mum once mistook for "the pipes going wrong" when she heard it emanating from my teenage bedroom. (Go onto iTunes or somewhere and listen to the track called "Slender Fungus" if you want to know what central heating malfunction set to music sounds like, and let's face it, who doesn't?)

Off to work where I was running not one but two court cases today with witnesses coming from all over. Myself and my trusty paralegal sidekick managed to pull off this "quart into a pint pot" feat and even managed to settle one of them in the course of the lunch break (hence the no time for lunch problem). Got out of court in the remaining case at 4pm having got through the evidence of the two professional witnesses who absolutely positively could not come back tomorrow if we didn't get them finished and we are pretty well organised for tomorrow.

Came home and helped First Born with his school project on William Wallace ("No, Wallace was not executed because they found out he was secretly also in on the truce with Robert Bruce. Yes he may have been emasculated. No I am not telling you what emasculated means.") and then had a nice supper with a very nice friend of ours who used to work with Husband back in his law firm days. We could have chatted all night but we are middle-aged and our stamina is not what it was and we need our sleep so he went off home about an hour ago. I am now sitting here blogging whilst Husband plays tennis on the Wii and tries to figure out how First Born manages his trademark vicious serve. I maintain that I win the moral high ground for not being the first grown up to succumb to the Wii when the children are not around. I am off to bed now to pray that Murphy, the God of anti-smug doesn't get me in the night. Night all!

Just another day

We don’t do Valentine’s day in our house. There will be no big pink envelopes lurking on the mat or bunches of curiously unscented overpriced roses sitting stiffly to attention in a vase. No chocolates (thank goodness) and no cuddly stuffed animals bearing squashy red satin hearts. The children will not be discreetly packed off so we can jostle elbow-to-elbow with strangers in a restaurant. And we will not feel the need to give our children Valentines cards or gifts (thank goodness that custom does not yet appear to have arrived from the USA – one more thing for me to forget to do!)

I will go home tonight as usual, make packed lunches and do all the stuff the boys need doing as usual. I will make dinner as usual. And Husband and I will probably watch something he has recorded for us because he takes the time to go through the schedules, picking out the programmes he thinks we’d like and recording them so I don’t have to and so that I don’t miss them. (He records anything with Peter Ustinov in it, for example.)

He will probably make me a cup of tea after dinner without even asking if I want one because he knows I nearly always do. He let me watch Torchwood last night without shaking his head in disbelief at the rubbish I watch or making any sotto voce comments regarding the gaping plot holes, even though I knew what he was thinking. He may, if he is home in time, come up to say goodnight to the boys after I have done so and, instead of turning out the light and leaving the room, he may lie down on the floor in their bedroom, with the light out and chat to the boys in the darkness about……well, I don’t know what about. Boy stuff. Father/son stuff. Gibberish, possibly. And if I jokingly demand to know what the Great Secret Boy Discussion was about, he will make a face at me and respond with the weird sound we all in this house refer to as “the squashed frog noise”, and which is considered an acceptable response to pretty much any question you may be asked.

Pretty much a perfect Valentine’s day, really.

Wii debrief

In the end we went for nice meal out on Monday evening (brie in filo pastry followed by medium rare steak, mmmmm) and then went home with the Wii. We needed to set it all up, get its internet connection sorted (and by we, I mean my husband of course because it started asking for SSID and MTU and other weird stuff and I went and made a cup of tea because that is the most useful thing I could do in the circumstances)

So we got it going and fired up the tennis game. Oh my goodness, what a laugh! Two grown lawyers in their living room at 11.30pm playing virtual tennis, waving their arms around like loons and laughing fit to burst. The boxing was just as fun - yells of "Stand still while I punch you!" as we threatened to knock the ornaments off the mantelpiece in our enthusiasm. We eventually packed it away at about 12.30 and went to bed. And so far we have resisted the temptation to unpack it again, just for a wee shot. So far.

And on the exercise front, I went for a run at the gym today but I am not happy about it as I just don't have time at lunchtimes to get a longer run in, and if I don't start doing longer runs, how on earth am I supposed to prepare to run for 6 miles around Edinburgh? In public, at that. I need to get into a running routine again, going out in the mornings, like I did last year. Someone make me do what I know darn well I ought to be doing, will you? Moan.

That counts as exercise, doesn't it?

I ran various errands at lunchtime today, including going to the bank to collect some traveller's cheques. These are required to pay the deposit on part of our accommodation for our holiday in June/July. The gentleman with whom we are going to be staying in Caraquet may have built his house with his own hands, he may play the accordian and he may be francophone and "un homme tres sympa" (according to his endearingly odd website) but he does not take credit cards, so cold hard Canadian Dollars it is. Just seeing those things makes it feel like the holiday is a bit nearer. Yippee! Only 5 months to go.

I also took a deep breath and crossed the threshhold of Gamestation in search of a Wii for First Born's birthday next week. I very quickly realised that I am 20 years too old and entirely the wrong gender to fit in in that shop. I tried to emulate the disgruntled slouch that seemed de rigeur with the clientele but I don't think I really pulled it off. I am however, now fully "Wii'd up" thanks to a very helpful gentleman behind the counter who took pity on me. He also cheerfully told me to make sure anyone playing with the Wii has plenty of space as apparently he once "took a wild swing and got my sister in the face with the controller". Dear lord, what have we let ourselves in for?

The boys are staying with Granny and Grandad tonight so in theory Hubby and I can do whatever we want. The options are (1) see an interesting thought-provoking adult film (no, not THAT kind of adult film, just one that does not involve Homer Simpson or Dr Who) and have a civilised grown-up meal out during which we can discuss the topics of the day without interruption; or (2) run home and play with the Wii all night. To check it is working okay, obviously.

Place your bets.