Tactical Friday

In the bleak midwinter

frosty wind made moan,

earth stood hard as iron,

water like a stone:

snow had fallen,

snow on snow, snow on snow,

in the bleak midwinter,

long ago.

-Christina Rossetti

The sky can't seem to decide what it wants to do. First snow whiting out the whole valley,

and now blue skies above and bright sunshine. I'm not fooled--the radar shows pale blue waves of snow showers drifting this way from over around Buffalo, with temperatures not forecast to get more than a degree or two above freezing all day. No point in breaking out the snow shovel just yet.

Which also means I'm limited today to destinations I can reach on foot. Peg took the Caddy and its AWD to work, leaving me with the rear wheel drive roadster. I've recounted here the adventure of the last time I tried to drive a Mercedes roadster in the snow, eventually abandoning it in a drift at the bottom of the hill after sliding backwards down Cedar Street.

So at some point I'll likely walk to the gym, maybe then to the wine store on Market Street where the cheery, chubby young lady will sell me a bottle of wine or four. I only have one phone appointment today, after lunch, to prep a witness for deposition. Hoping to get some writing done on the constant list of projects crying out for my attention.

And there's the looming presence of final exams at NYU, the first now a week away. I know the others have begun outlining, based on their questions to the prof on the message board. The questions themselves intimidate me a little, given that these folks are deeply in the weeds on things I'm struggling to retain and comprehend. I looked up two of them, young female lawyers in big firms with undergraduate degrees in finance. My history degree doesn't provide the same sort of foundation.

I have maybe three hours of lectures left to watch. I knocked out one this morning, and read a ton of material on how to structure the sale of a business for tax purposes--bread and butter stuff in the world I'll be inhabiting. If all goes according to plan, I should finish the content of the two courses by tomorrow afternoon, and by Saturday start creating the massive outlines of my three months' worth of notes that I'll carry into the open book finals.

This morning I pondered for a moment how much easier life would be if I hadn't signed up for all this. Easy, yes, but more of the same law practice I'm hoping to shift out of as I get too old to bicker in the courtroom. No pain, no gain.

Speaking of which, it's time to get after that writing list. I figure two good hours of that, then the gym (on foot, in the snow), then a couple more hours of paying work before P gets home. She's declared herself a four-day-a-week CRNA now, a well-earned throttling back after decades of taking care of folks 8-10 hours a day, five days a week (and, she'd remind me if she were here, a lot more hours than that back when she took call). I haven't managed to completely clear the decks tomorrow, with one phone call to handle, but my schedule is sufficiently spare that we'll likely brave the snow and drive up to the condo later today to enjoy the views across the lake as the hills around us are blanketed in the white stuff. All pretty good.