restricted delivery

i love it when i mail something certified mail, restricted delivery, and then the post office doesn't restrict delivery.

my client paid $10.00 for that piece of mail.  now i'm just supposed to pay another $10 to send it out again? 

i even wrote RESTRICTED DELIVERY on the front AND back of the envelope in great. big. capital. letters.

so i called the post office to complain and hung up after they kept me on hold for nine minutes.

***

i also love it when i put my courthouse file in my briefcase, take it home for the night, and then go straight to the courthouse in the morning to get a bunch of stuff filed before i go into the office, and then i get to the court clerk's desk and find that i don't, in fact, have my courthouse file in my briefcase, but instead the client file that i was last working on yesterday evening.

i hate daylight savings time, redux

from my aunt jewell:

When told the reason for daylight savings time, the Old Indian said, "Only the Government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket."

productivity

yesterday i unpacked all my books and organized them on the freshly painted shelves (alphabetically: fiction, nonfiction, reference, poetry, art, and self-help).  hooray for anal-rententiveness!  i also boxed up all of my maternity clothes, and washed, dried, folded, and put up every single piece of laundry in the house.  all in between helping autumn thaw out after her numerous trips outside to play in the snow (wearing my lawn-mowing tennis shoes, no less, because we don't have any junky shoes for her that fit), and playing with aislinn.  of course, jake was here to help, too.  and erin came over in the evening for a couple of hours to play with aislinn, feed her some cereal, and give her a bath.

it's amazing how much you can get done on the weekend when you're getting up at 7:00 a.m. (thanks, aislinn) instead of noon.

today i'm going to head over to lowe's and buy some more paint samples.  i'm itching to get the wall color for the living room nailed down.  after a discussion with jake and erin last night, i think that i've figured out that their problem with the colors, in art-school speak, is that the yellows are too saturated (or in their words, "it needs to be brown-er").  and of course jake maintains that he doesn't care what color i paint the walls, but let's be honest: if i paint them a color that he totally hates, at some point it's going to come back to haunt me.

so i'm going to spend the next couple of hours taping off the trim work while jake sleeps in, and then i'm off to battle the slushy streets to bring home some more samples.  at $4.95 each, i could have already painted the whole room!  grrrrrr.

updates all around

so, what have we been up to lately?

jake has been working very hard lately.  he has a variety of projects going on at work.  he works remotely most of the time which means he gets to work from home, but this isn't nearly as convenient as i originally thought because it means that he has to sequester himself away from the household chaos in order to be on conference calls a lot of the time.  he's also been working about one night a week - but he thrives when he's working nights.  which is amazing to me, because it would make me absolutely miserable.

as mentioned in my previous post, i've been very busy at work.  business is good, and i think that long-term opening up my own practice is the best possible move i could have made for my career and my family.  but it's keeping me very, very busy as i work out all of the kinks.  who knew that keeping track of your own trust account and doing your own billing are such colossal time-sappers?  as a result, on the weekends we've mostly been staying home, resting, and catching up on housework and sleep.  recently that's been getting to me a little bit and i've felt the need to get back in touch with my friends and family who i used to see much more often.  so you should take that as an open invitation to make weekend plans with us.  anyone up for saturday brunch?  want to meet at the cherry street farmer's market when it opens?  head over to lowe's and pick out some potted cherry tomato plants for the back patio?  i'm up for it.

autumn is finishing up kindergarten and she's doing great.  she is reading books from cover to cover completely on her own, and they are going to test her for the gifted program in the fall.  she is still the sweetest kid around and a great big sister.  she's listening to the jonas brothers and starting to pick out her own clothes (with interesting results, but i try to go along with it since it's part of her developing personality).  this summer it looks like we're going to enroll her in the summer camp that aislinn's daycare is putting on for the school-age kids, and it will be WONDERFUL to have them both in the same program.

aislinn will be seven months old tomorrow--and she was diagnosed with her first ear infection today.  last night i left her with jake, a happy baby who was ready for bed, and went out with a friend for a few hours.  when i came back jake was completely, completely frazzled.  apparently he'd put aislinn down to bed and she woke up thirty minutes later, screaming, and proceeded to scream for the next two hours until i got home.  it was a miserable night, with her waking up in obvious distress every thirty minutes.  i wasn't quite sure what was wrong because she wasn't running a fever, and it's hard to pin down the source of discomfort in an apparently healthy but extremely fussy infant.

this morning i woke up after very little sleep and had to leave the house at 7:45 a.m. to get autumn to school and make it to a hearing, so i left aislinn asleep in bed with jake.  7:45 a.m. is early for me.  i usually leave the house around 8:30 a.m.  anyway, i was so out of sorts that i filled out an Order and Notice of Hearing as "111 o'clock a.m. in courtroom 9:00."  thank god the court clerk noticed my error because it would have been super embarrassing to have sent that out to opposing counsel.

when i got back to the house at 10:00 a.m. i found a happy, cooing baby.  what????  but she was still refusing the bottle so i went ahead and took her to the pediatrician.  sure enough, ear infection.

hopefully tonight will be a better night.

other milestones: aislinn isn't really on hands and knees yet, but she's on hands and toes, push-up style.  unfortunately she hasn't worked out how to transition this position into moving, and since she goes from hands and toes to resting on her heels over and over, she tends to move away from her goal which makes her very angry.

yesterday she "pulled up" for the first time.  aunt erin was visiting and had set her in the laundry basket which aislinn thought was just hilarious.  and then the next thing we knew, she had grasped the top of the basket and pulled herself up like it was no big deal.

she's figured out "object permanence."  that is, when you put a wash cloth over her pacifier, the pacifier doesn't just disappear - it's still there, and now she knows she can move the wash cloth and retrieve the pacifier.  this is a big step, but at the same time now when i take my blackberry away from her, she cranes her neck around in every direction to figure out where i put it and how she can get it BACK.

she's eating veggies, fruits, and oatmeal.  today i gave her a wheat "biter biscuit" for the first time, which she promptly turned into mush.  i also gave her a handful of banana flavored gerber "puffs," which are like airy graham crackers the size of oyster crackers.  she couldn't quite figure out that they were food, but she found it very entertaining to chase them around the high chair tray trying to gather up every single one of them in her chubby little hands at the same time.

as far as the house goes, the shelves in the living room have been painted, which took me about a week of working an hour or two a day. it was a big project.  now i'm trying to nail down the wall color, and i have swatches painted all over the walls.  i thought i had come pretty close to a decision between three nice khaki-gold colors until erin came over to give her opinion and declared them to be "olive, peach, and pumpkin" and every one of them ugly.

harmph.  i wish i valued her opinion less, because now i'm seriously bothered.

tonight i made a huge pot of chili and jake and autumn picked up some fritos on the way home.  (and caramel corn.  this is why i don't send jake to the store.  he always buys sweets.  always.)  aislinn has been asleep for two hours so that bodes well for the rest of the night.  jake and autumn are watching "darby o'gill and the little people" and eating caramel corn on the couch, and i am going to spend some time zoning out on my laptop and then i'll be in bed by 9:30.  blissfully boring, and i wouldn't have it any other way.  i had my crazy days in the sun, and i'm so glad that i did when i had the chance, because if i hadn't then i don't think that this new season of my life would be quite so satisfying.

so that brings everything up to date.  see ya'll on the flip side.

I AM THE WORST BLOGGER EVER

i don't even know when i last posted, and i'm embarrassed to check out the date.  needless to say that things have been very busy.  i learned in law school that divorce business peaks around the holidays, which is apparently a complete misconception because march has been downright hoppin'.

porcupine meatballs

my mom used to make these when i was a kid.  they're a great weeknight meal.  they're named "porcupine meatballs" because of the way they look when you roll the meatballs in uncooked rice before cooking them, but autumn hasn't caught onto that yet and she's convinced she's been eating real porcupine all these years.  and who am i to spoil that for her?  *wink*

ingredients:

1lb lean hamburger meat (you really want to use lean, otherwise you will have greasy sauce)

1 28oz can tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes

1/2 sleeve club crackers (or saltines in a pinch)

worchestershire sauce

salt and pepper

garlic powder

1 egg

1.5 cups minute rice

make the meatballs

put the hamburger meat in a large mixing bowl.  add the club crackers, crumbling them with your hands on top of the hamburger meat.  add the egg, and plenty of salt, pepper, and garlic powder.  add some worchestershire sauce (about 1/8 cup, or 10 big dashes).

mix the hamburger meat well with your hands and form into 5 or 6 large meatballs.

in a separate shallow bowl or dish, pour the minute rice.  roll the meatballs in the minute rice and then set them in a large saute pan.

make the sauce

pour the tomato sauce into a large mixing bowl.  add another 1/8 cup or so of worchestershire sauce, plus more salt, pepper, and garlic powder.  if you're cooking for only grown-ups, you might add some tony's.  but watch out - this stuff is SPICY.  a little goes a loooooong way.

keep adding spices and worchestershire until it tastes right to you.  don't make the mistake i made the last time i made these - i mixed the sauce in the same bowl that i had mixed the meatballs, without washing it.  and i was on my second spoonful of taste-testing the sauce when i realized that there was still raw hamburger meat all over the bowl.  i literally paused with the spoon halfway in my mouth, panicked, and ran to the sink.  funny how i could eat sushi for every meal, but raw hamburger finds me rinsing my mouth out under the kitchen faucet.  i guess it's a hangover from my vegetarian days.

ANYWAY.  

cook

pour the sauce over the meatballs:

then cover the sauce pan and simmer for about 10 minutes, carefully spooning sauce over the meatballs every few minutes.  then carefully turn the meatballs over in the sauce, and simmer for another ten minutes.

most of the rice will actually come off the meatballs into the sauce, but that's cool.  they'll look about like this when they're done:

this day i served them with steamed squash and salad:

we are big salad eaters in our house. or maybe we're just big ranch dressing eaters, and lettuce is the best vehicle to get it into our mouths. 

well, i say that, but i'm not as big on ranch as jake and autumn are.  i recently found this dressing and i am in LURV with it.  i buy a new dressing every time i run out.  i'm extremely brand disloyal.  i never buy the same thing twice.  salad dressing, shampoo, toilet paper - i'm always changing it up.  which is not without its complications, because now that i actually share my household with someone else, jake is always saying, "why did you quit buying that ______ that i liked so much?"  and i'm like, "i have absolutely no clue what you're talking about."

anyway, my new salad dressing fave is Newman's Own Low Fat Sesame Ginger.  it tastes exactly like the salad dressing at Fuji sushi bar at 71st and memorial where brooke and i used to go every saturday for lunch after long nights out in college.  there's no amount of tequila that a volcano roll can't cure.

enjoy the porcupine meatballs - and messing with your kids about what they're made from.  that alone makes them worthwhile.

good news for people who love bad news

aislinn slept through the night last night!  

but then she woke up at 5:00 a.m. rarin' to go.

sleep deprivedly,

melissa