Glad I am not alone. Tim just tried to give me some shortcuts but I just basically don't get the logic here so today was about 20 minutes to get in. Okay- Magda, Alverno had custodian/maintenance tunnels that they opened on horrible days, but there were only a couple of buildings involved. Thanks for the photos.

Michele, Susan says "negative". So, you still don't feel right and still don't know what it is? So, is MS ruled out or ruled out for now, we'll check again? This still sounds scarey. Pls do a general blog update.

Daryl Waltrip has just yelled Booggity boogity boogity and the pace car pulled off. Its cold and gusty in Daytona. I love the linguistics. Sterling Marlin speaks Tennessian- its incomprehensible. Deedubya speaks more genereic southern ie "hisseff' but i think I like the lowest common denominator verb conjugating the best: seen. As in "I seen, he seen, we seen..." and no "'s' where we all would expect them in contractions- ie, "doesn't it", is pronounced duhdnit ', " ( really sounds more like dndnd ). A lttle more variety this year, in addition to the Southern and Wisconsin versions of I seen and dndnd, Mr. Montoya speaks grammatically impecable English with a lovely Antonio Banderas accent. First big spinnout- , another language/pronunciation oddity, American/Arabic Boris Said (pronounced by Sah- eeed normally) is "sed" here. Boris spun out. And there are a couple of really cute young guys.

Anyway, it has come to my attention that it may not be common knowledge that I'm a Nascar/Nextel fan. Its been a slow development, but as Tim gets out less, I watch more TV and Sunday PM races fill in the football off season gap. I started paying attention to Matt Kenseth and just started watching more. This week has been quite interesting- scandal and national mainstream news on racing's equivalent of a steroid scandal. But dirty driver, media darling Jeff Gordon's violation was 'inadvertent" awwww, so no huge fine/points loss. Oh, and that was a violation of racing's version of Miss Manners rules. One does not criticize the media darlings. All others got big fines and penalties. As technology improves its almost a participant activity- lots of wired and camera fitted cars. Its fun to drive 200 mph from the couch.

Sorry we are missing the BBQ chicken party. I'm still struggling to master the Quikbooks time encoding that streamlines billing, so I am billing during the race. . SPD cases may not be billed until completed, assignment to withdrawal or closure of the case, usually appeal. Several of the cases I just picked up are already two or more years old so the retired attorney has been working them all this time without payment and can finally bill his time-while I have three of them still awaiting jury trial. I have several that i have had open for nearly a year before plea/sentencing and appeal, then billing. And, altho we are getting some favorable news for SPD funds, we are currently lagging way behind. Optimium has been three weeks from submission to check, right now it's seven weeks from submission to a partial payment we got Friday, which was the first $ we have seen since first week of January. And all of my colleagues are in the same boat- all hit a post Christmas drought, regardless of how steadily they have billed. I am still sporatic in my billing, but even the folks who have enuf cases to bill almost weekly have run into this.

I keep adding cases to work towards having some billables every week, but case duration is simply not predictable. Oh well. I had a couple of particularly bizarre moments this week: one young man, , in custody since April last, announced "I dreamed of you!" the night before he got the notice he had a new attorney because of the retirement-the second was almost too surreal, reaffirmed how badly I had to get outta Dodge- Pat Barrett burst out laughing during a pretrial conference- "Oh Maura, you are SUCH an optimist!" Yikes. I am a pacifist. I am a pacifist. Punching her out would be bad for my client. I am a pacifist. Oooh, but it would be soooo satisfying to smack her in the chops. And she really thought she would be a good judge and just doesn't (whoops, ddnd) get that every body who knows her disagreed.

M&D told us last nite that my puppy monolgue last week reminded them of Living with Marley, the current Chapter A Day selection. Gliffy survived eating the plastic and wire with no apparant hardship. The two of them loved the beautiful fluffy snow we had, and are soooooo happy its warming up. Remember watching the fox hunting under the snow at Mark's last year? We must have lots of little voles and mice under the snow around here, because these two pounce and burrow all over. Inside, they discovered apples this week. Amazing how well they can play apple hockey and throw stuff without opposable thumbs. Glif is miffed because Tim found a way to secure the cage agian. So he made up for it by knocking stacks of files ovever because then you can run and skid on all those loose scattered papers. And paper makes nice satisfying crunchy sounds too. Has NOT mastered origami- that I think, requires that thumb thing. He leaves these big muddy prints all over the documents. Hums more as he gets older too.

Race blog update- rookie spins out veteran in pit row and one of the cars just started dropping big sharp pieces out the back end. Toyota is not showing so well and Matt Kenseith is doing just fine in 7th with a suspended crew chief.


Big crash, the two leaders smashed up. Inside the car camera of the crash. Interesting. They drive so fast and so close to each other! That woke the babies up. Time to take them out.

'Nite from B'oo.

Maura