Uh oh.

Only the UN can save us!

I would have fled to Canada

Wow, it was totally awesome sliding all the way down 14th Street to work today. It goes almost straight downhill near my house, next to an empty lot, which of course means no one shoveled the sidewalk, so it's literally an ice slide. Instead, I decided to walk in the cleared street - you know, next to oncoming Metro buses. I really can't imagine how all these bus-pedestrian accidents are happening recently.

The best part is - my firm is closed today! But President's Day is not a paid holiday for me, so I get to hang out and...I don't know, maybe I'll continue my organizing kick and get this office cleaned.

So I get online this morning, and who do I see but the infamous Quinn, who had disappeared off the face of the planet for quite sometime. Actually just moving offices, but still. We got a little time to catch up, but since I really haven't talked to him since I got back from India, I just said,

Me: "It's actually been a really crappy couple of weeks, but I'm determined that they're over now! So let us not speak of it."
Q: "what? just a word: work, guy, roommie?"
Me: "yes...and much more." and eventually ended up going through the whole thing, from my awful trip last weekend, to my grandpa being in the hospital with what we feared was something very serious and me being all freaked out thinking I was going to have to book a flight home to say goodbye or something (he's okay, whew...but I just got all stressed out again just typing that out), and all the other little whacked-out things that happened in addition and/or as a result of me being super-stressed out...
Q: "mouth agape. what did you do?"
me: "naturally, I hibernated all weekend and cleaned."
Q: "I would have fled to Canada."

Heh. Which, in retrospect, wouldn't have been a bad option. At least, I bet they know how to salt the sidewalks there. However, it is a new day, a new week and a new year, and I am going to buy my new phone in an hour, which, of course, is going to have a clean slate of its own. I'm off to organize!

P.S. Is it weird that I mostly really, really hate Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but am listening to Heavy Metal on repeat?

Update: SEE!

I only read news stories that begin:

"Lasers beamed from space..."

Jackpot!

I have this two drawer metal filing cabinet that I've been hauling around from house to house for awhile now. In this last move, my dear friend, who I owe a million bucks for all the lifting he did, unfortunately picked it up in such a way that everything inside came tumbling to one end, making it impossible to open. My reaction: stop using it. But today is New Year's Day and the Official Day of Official House Organizing, so I ripped the damn thing open after about twenty minutes of struggling.

Obviously, most of this stuff needed to be thrown out. I can be a bit of a packrat when it comes to my papers, and so I've been weeding through the five year old leasing agreements, notes from Tax Law, articles from 2002 on potential liberal activist jobs, and so forth.

Then I got to my folder where I keep copies of my published articles. That sounds fancy, but it's really just all the undergrad and law school mags I worked for, and a few other random, not-that-impressive things. However, as I continued to flit through the papers, I came upon gold. Freaking Gold people. I clerked for a city office while I was in law school, re-writing some big policy rules for them, but thought I'd lost all my work when my computer blew up a few weeks later, after my internship but before I'd backed anything up. Hello: I'D PRINTED THEM OUT. You guys, I can't tell you how in need I am of writing samples for law jobs. I really lost a lot because of my shitty Mac that kept dying inexplicably during school and my backup drive that eventually got some awesome virus. Oh, and I also came across that Iraq memo - the one I blogged about after the SotU, that never got published. Whatever, it's still 80 pages of my work, and I'm doing a little dance right now.

After the memos, I found a copy of one of the law school mags I had an article in. It's kind of shame, that mag was SO BADLY organized, like a bunch of monkeys were running the publication, that I ended up quitting after two issues, when, looking back, what I should have done was organize a coup and taken over the damn thing. Oh well. I was slightly amused, however, by my last article for them, in March 2003, titled, "Have the Democrats found an answer in Nancy Pelosi?" Excerpt:

With the scales just waiting to be tipped in the House of Representatives and Pelosi looking easily into a ninth term, we may very well be calling her Speaker Pelosi in the near future.

Yes, yes we will.