“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
– Seneca
Paused before writing this to review a pretrial scheduling order, after seeing a deadline for expert witness disclosures on my calendar today. Good grief; I don't see where my paralegal has even started on this, and there's a lot to it. I was supposed to be picking a jury this morning in another case. When was she going to come to me about this one?
Another reason for going out on my own. It's harder to get blindsided when you're not relying on anyone to help.
Of course, this last week getting ready for the new firm's launch has been mired in constant enshittification. I keep getting locked out of the new email as it asks me for authentication to show it's really me. The program tells me the administrator requires it. I'm the administrator. I mandated no such thing, and frankly couldn't care less if Bulgarian hackers read my emails.
And I still have to use another computer to access my current firm's email system.
Last night I found myself locked out of the current firm's sharefile system, which apparently identified me as an intruder when I bought Microsoft 365 for myself, which in turn has its own cloud-based document storage system. This morning all was forgiven, with no explanation whatsoever, and I can freely access my files again.
As the Bills were letting us down again against the Chiefs, in their traditional end--of-season belly flop, I worked on creating a venue rental agreement for Wyldswood. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I took several PDFs I found online for similar event venues, and tried to create an agreement that incorporated the best features of each. This in turn required converting from PDF to Word, then a lot of cutting-and-pasting. But the Word program on my MS 365 kept refusing to let me save or edit, insisting I needed to buy the software license again when I already bought it when I set up the URL and email. Then the converted Word document had all sorts of random page breaks, and wouldn't let me cut-and-paste more than a couple lines at a time. By halftime, I was literally shouting with rage at the entire situation.
It's no wonder I can't sleep at night for more than a couple hours, wrestle with extended periods of outright panic as all of these transitions coalesce into something as daunting and traumatic as the end of 2018, when they were bulldozing my house, I left my mostly destroyed firm, and P and I were about to embark on this uncertain journey together.
I guess I should remind myself that all turned out fine, despite the odds.
If I really had to drill down, I think the thing that makes this period so stressful isn't changing my practice or selling Tara or opening the venue--it's all that happening on top of the extreme pressure of practicing law with too many cases and not enough support, with deadlines piling one atop the other as the Florida rules change to tie judges' hands where a lawyer misses a filing or simply needs more time. If I were doing all this with maybe a third of the open files I have now, it might all feel differently. Then again, with these rumors of me leaving Panama City, that might come to pass, for better or worse.
Another daunting task list today, so time to get at it.
A pretty morning, all the same. We're supposed to get up into the 40s by the end of the week. Winter isn't what it used to be.
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