Thursday mornings I have to be out of the house no later than 7:50 am. Class begins at 9:00 and the day steamrolls on from then. At minimum it's a 15 hour day. Today is Thursday and it's not been fun.

Some time before dawn, I was on point to defend the losing side of a case about the use of an amalgamated demonstrative animation. (For those of you not in Law-law land, that means a video used to explain the testimony of an expert witness or three. For example, it might be a video that shows how a car wreck occurred. Things like that are easier for a jury to see than to visualize as an engineer explains tire tracks and the distribution pattern of broken glass and car parts.) I had to represent a defendant who didn't want the prosecution to use a video that showed him killing his wife, and then rigging the scene to make it look like a drunken self-defense killing. I didn't win. The original defendant didn't win either, so I guess I don't feel too bad, but it sure was prophetic for the rest of the day.

Since I'd forgotten to bring an appropriate boobage retention device for my planned workout, I decided to go shoe shopping instead. Unfortunately the shoes were for Heidi Hinkle, Jetta extraordinaire, not for me. Heidi practically wore through the soles of her front shoes and the sides were cracking as well. Egads! Off to Costco. I should have just turned around and gone to REI to get a replacement boulder stabilization bandage. But no. "Our electricity is Off" wasn't a bright enough sign for me that this wasn't a good plan. "2 hours max," the guy said. Three and a half hours is what he should have said.

By itself, that wouldn't be too terrible. Alas, I've also been on hold for 15 minutes while listening to a mechanized robot tell me the delay is unusual every 30 seconds. The only mercy was that said voice kept interrupting the Lite Alternative Adult Contemporary hold music. That call was to find out what is up with my cell phone that I ordered two days ago. No new phone for me, I couldn't get through.