"Few things are brought to a successful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought."
A late start to all this, while trying to figure out why our internet connection has degraded like it has over the last several weeks. Some sort of bandwidth throttling? Neighbors hanging around their homes playing video games on the same mojo wire? The crackheads in the crumbling slum mansion next door stealing our wifi?
Don't ask me--I'm sixty. I did just order a wifi booster from Amazon that I can put up here on the second floor to make sure what little signal we are getting from our router is making it here to the back of the old house. We considered getting another Starlink setup for this place, being fairly happy with the arrangement at Wyldswood, but I can't bring myself to send the owner of that enterprise any more money. So the Amazon Astronaut gets it instead, the lesser of two evils.
Meanwhile, the thing that will likely destroy Wyldswood in just under two days churns north into the Gulf. Mike's Weather Page, an ad crowded website run by a guy obsessed with tropical weather, notes that this one promises to be stronger than Idalia, maybe much stronger. It doesn't look likely to pass directly over the farm this time, but being just to the east is nearly as bad.
Peg's pretty sanguine about all this, at least on the surface. Surprising, given that Wyldswood is her creation. I worry because that's how I'm wired, worry as much about those two new donkeys and all those calves as what's going to happen to the new and underinsured party barn.
Friends in the panhandle feverish repost on Facebook this morning that the thing has drifted a little westward overnight, something they fail to note was predicted and baked into the forecast path of the storm. "Maybe our lives will be wrecked again!", they seem to be suggesting, feverish and giddy at the prospect. I think some have honest to God PTSD after Michael; others are just bored and unhappy and welcome chaos and destruction as a distraction from a pointless and miserable existence. These same people will be showing up in droves to vote for DJT in a few days.
In the midst of all this, law practice goes on. I'm in a bit of a tiff with a client in one of my many, numbingly dull construction defect cases. As with most of them, this one is plodding along too slowly for the client, but pretty much at the pace I expected. I suggested yesterday that a mediation scheduled in a couple weeks be moved, so the defendant could gather more information to make an informed decision about writing a check. In response I got an all-caps explosion from the little Southern man who speaks for the board I represent, berating me for even making the suggestion and demanding that we mediate as scheduled and then proceed to trial.
This is utter foolishness. See, here's how it works: a contractor gets sued for doing crappy work on a big building. The contractor hands the case over to his insurance company. The insurance company hires some South Florida hamburger to represent him in this Bay County case, and that hamburger retains the same flannel-mouthed expert witness who's compliantly testified for him or her a hundred times before. Hamburger arranges to send expert to jobsite to see all the work he's already prepared to say is just fine, thank you. That visit needs to happen several weeks prior to the mediation, so the expert can whisper his actual opinions about what may be wrong with the defendant's work and the insurance company can decide how much to offer at mediation.
If all of these things don't happen in that sequence and spacing, mediation is a waste of time because the party with the checkbook will say they don't have enough information to make an offer.
In this case, the expert site visit is scheduled for only a day or two before the mediation, delayed in large measure by the fact that we were delayed in starting the tear-out of the bad work that would expose what needs to be exposed to evaluate the claim. The lawyers on both sides have done this dance a thousand times, and all agree moving the mediation back by maybe a month will make it far more likely the case settles.
But my client, a self-trained lawyer apparently, isn't buying any of my advice, peppering his spittle-flecked keyboard offerings with phrases like "FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT" and "WE WILL JUST TAKE THEM TO TRIAL!"
All of this is objectively stupid. My job is not to score some moral victory; I'm here to get the most net return for the client to fix the building. That means spending as little as reasonably necessary on the lawsuit, and carefully evaluating the possibility that the insurance company may in the end decide the claim isn't covered, meaning a judgment but no money. Certainly, I'm paid to try cases, and sometimes that's necessary--statistically, well under 2% of the time, but it happens. That's how I spent last week, in fact. But really I'm paid to advise and help a client navigate a process I understand pretty well after going on twenty-eight years of doing this.
Which has me this morning thinking of The Gallant Hood.
My knucklehead client being a good Southern Boy, as I pretend to be, I'm sure he'd understand the analogy.
In the spring of 1864 Sherman's Atlanta campaign crawled down the foothills between Chattanooga and Atlanta. The Army of Tennessee was led by Joseph E. Johnston, whose badly outmanned and outgunned troops engaged in a series of strategic retreats, bloodying the noses of the Yankees in several sharp engagements and extending Sherman's supply lines perilously through enemy territory. At Kennesaw Mountain, which loomed over the neighborhood where I went to elementary school, Johnston's troops mowed down the attacking federals on a scale not seen since Fredericksburg and Cemetery Ridge. The Confederates had given ground, but kept their army more or less intact, with ever-shorter internal lines of communication and supply while Sherman was stretched a hundred miles up the road, protecting his supply lines from Joe Wheeler's cavalry.
As a West Point grad himself, Jefferson Davis had to understand all this. And yet, just as the Rebs formed a line of defense along Peachtree Creek just north of Atlanta, Davis fired Johnston for being too timid, replacing him with thirty-three year old John Bell "Sam" Hood.
No one doubted Hood's bravery. In fact, he spent so much time leading his troops rather than dictating from the rear that he was becoming progressively smaller, with a shattered arm suffered at Gettysburg and a leg amputated four inches below the hip after his femur was shattered at Chickamauga. Hood had just finished a convalescence in Richmond after losing his leg, and his marriage proposal to the beautiful Buck Preston had been rejected, her family disapproving of the Kentucky bumpkin on crutches. Maybe this disappointment colored what happened next.
If you grew up in the South, and especially around Atlanta, you've probably heard this one. In the space of a few weeks Hood ordered a series of reckless frontal assaults and overly complex nighttime flanking maneuvers against Sherman's entrenched troops. Thousands died at the Battles of Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Jonesboro. Hood effectively wrecked the Army of Tennessee, then marched the rump of what was left to die on the outskirts of Nashville in a series of pointless frontal assaults he thought might toughen up his boys, at least the ones who weren't already dead. And all the while he was sending notes to Sherman pledging the South would fight to the last man rather than succumb to rule by Negroes. A real charmer.
Did the South have a chance before Hood's military self-immolation? Maybe. Atlanta fell barely two months before the 1864 presidential election, in which Lincoln appeared headed for defeat at the hands of a war-weary electorate. Hood wasn't a great tactical thinker, but he was a train wreck as a strategic thinker, with the election just around the corner and the possibility of a President McClellan signing a peace treaty with my treasonous ancestors. When the Confederate military operation in the West (that would be Atlanta, among other spots) melted away, so too did any chance for victory.
My client grew up with those stories, the same as I did. We just drew different lessons, I guess, his about martial valor and mine about the consequences of recklessness and short-term thinking.
Time to do a law school lesson on tax deductions, then start working on reshuffling my work calendar for the inevitable trip to clear debris at our beloved little farm.
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