Watching: Unrepeatable. Just shut up.
Also watching: The West Wing. Lord, how I do love that show and every single character on it. I mean, I love them. And it's nice to still have a Democratic president once a week.
Anticipating: Yet another hour of Sorkin-induced television bliss with an hour of SportsNight tonight. God bless Comedy Central. Now, if only I didn't have to put up with all those inane Strip Mall commercials.
Still listening: To Corina's Crazy Funky 80's Mix. I am so Kilroy.
Looking: In my glove compartment. Some comedian I saw recently (ahem) pointed out that you never actually have gloves in your glove compartment; instead, there's usually "a bit of an apple, a cassette with no holder, and a map of Belgium or something." I was thusly inspired to open my own glove compartment, which I haven't done in ages. The contents: the car's manual, my Garbage CD, an "AAA of Southern California" information packet, a picture of my old New World boss, one tampon, a box of AA batteries, one roll of orange Rolaids, and some Subway napkins.
Go open your glove compartments, people. I'd love to hear what you've got in there.
Admiring: Athena, for so proudly beating her Republican drums in the midst of the cacophony of doomsdaying endlessly spouted by the overwhelmingly liberal journaling community. However...
Not admiring: Bush for taking all of 72 hours in office before cutting abortion funding. I'm surprised it took him that long.
Quote of the day: "People have to understand that cold, stiff, blue people can be resuscitated." --Dr. Murray Hamlet, a hypothermia resuscitation expert in Natick, MA, after EMTs there put a cold, stiff, blue, live woman into a body bag and took her to a funeral home, where she woke up, probably quite surprised.
Now, I chose my doctor in that close-your-eyes-and-point kind of method. The benefits people at work handed us a big book and said, "Here, pick your primary care physician."
Actually, I did narrow it down a bit. I wanted an office attached to a hospital. I don't know, it just makes me feel better to have a hospital right there, just in case. And obviously, I picked something relatively close to where I live.
But other than that, it was basically the first one I found that met that criteria and were accepting new patients.
And boy, was I lucky. My doctor is fabulous. She came in and sat down and asked me very detailed questions about my medical history, the back problem, when it started and how it happened and how long it lasted and how I went to the bathroom and everything.
And after all of that, she looked at me and said, "Okay. My job is to make sure that this never happens to you again, so we are going to do everything we can to find out what's wrong and then do everything we can to fix it."
And I was so very, very happy. When I went to the doctor the last time, back in Pennsylvania, she was like, "Here's some drugs, go to physical therapy, lose some weight," and I was out the door in fifteen minutes. Not quite so helpful.
Going to have an x-ray on Saturday. Getting an MRI as soon as we can finagle through the HMO system. Getting some basic bloodwork done, cholesterol levels and thyroid function and just making sure I'm not dying of some weird blood disease.
I love this doctor. I was reminded that doctors are actually supposed to want to make us better. I'm sure most of them do, but I just found one that was better at expressing it, and I'm so happy.
In other happy news, things continue to go extremely well for me at work.
I think I wrote in the last entry about how the Partner (although he was just 'the partner' last time) said nice things about me to another analyst. Well, today, the Partner called me (me!) directly because he's working on a deposition in a non-New York case and wanted a copy of the outline we worked on for the last NY depo he took.
So when I went down to his office to drop it off, I took with me this chart I had been working on most of the day. We had talked about it in a meeting we had with the other analysts last night, about how we needed something that would provide certain information about each of our cases with just a quick glance, and that's what I did today, so I took it down to him to get his suggestions before I distributed it to the team.
So we're sitting there chatting about how the deposition went when the senior analyst (I'll call him... Sam, for Senior Analyst Man) walked in with some other kinds of charts that he was going to send to the in-house counsel woman at the tobacco company.
Whereupon I took the opportunity to present each of them with a copy of my chart (we New York team members like to be charted within an inch of our lives) and, well, he liked it.
Okay, he loved it. And when an associate on our team walked in the office, the associate loved it, and then the Partner handed my chart to Sam and said, "Here, send this to the client too."
And I'm sitting there going, no, wait, it's like a draft of an internal chart, I was not apprised of any sending to any client. But fortunately, because I did actually learn a thing or two in law school, I made sure it was perfect before I even considered showing it to the Partner, so I didn't say anything.
It sounds like a nominal thing, I know, but to me, it's a very big deal. My work product, loved and adored by the Partner and an associate, went to the client.
That's kind of cool.
It was actually kind of a big day at work in other ways as well, There has been another trial going on in New York (a class action suit, so it's not one I work on, and it's not the one we won last week). It's been going for about three months or so, and just went to the jury on Monday. So the jury has been deliberating for three days, and they've come back with various and sundry requests to the judge, which was all well and good until they sent some notes to the judge today, the result of which forced a mistrial.
To be honest, I'm a bit sketchy on the whole privilege issue in this area, so I'm not sure how much I can share as far as exactly what was going on in the jury room that caused the mistrial. But just know that this is a huge deal. It isn't like one side or the other screwed up. They were both fine with how the trial went, both wanted a verdict from this jury, and now, due to no fault of their own, they have to start all over, with no one from whom they can recover the costs of being in trial for three months and the years of preparation leading up to this trial.
I can say that there was wagering going on about just how drunk counsel from all sides would get tonight.
