A Busy Man

No blog entry for several days. Sorry, Loyal Readers; I’ve been busy. It’s astonishing to me that, for a man with no regular job, I should be so busy all the time. How did I ever keep up when I was working at LOOTGM? How will I keep up in a few months when I am working full-time again? I certainly look forward to doing that, but there are so many distractions and demands on my time right now that I despair of ever getting much done other than at the last minute.

Thursday and Friday, The Wife had a temporary work gig at a company in downtown Knox. The Wife asked that I drive her to and from work, and that I also drive down to have lunch with her both days. Being a loving husband who can’t say no to an innocent request like that, I did what she asked. The drive took more than twenty minutes each way — that was close to two hours spent in the car playing chauffeur. Not that I mind spending time with The Wife, but objectively, the travel back and forth was a lot of wasted time.

Friday, I taught my online classes in the morning and dealt with something in the California firm after again meeting The Wife for lunch — I just stayed downtown and worked at Panera Bread rather than come home again. After that, The Wife and I went to The Estate At Louisville and helped prepare dinner with my mother. We got caught in a very intense thunderstorm on the way home, and had to pull off the road and wait out dime- to nickel-sized hail. That night, I watched Doctor Who with The Wife in the evening.

Saturday was completely shot with the RET dinner party at our house. After teaching in the morning, The Wife got her hair cut while I shopped for the raw material to make a table full of tapas, and everything got ready just in time for the guests to show up. Our friends stayed until late in the night, and we got most of the cleanup done before turning in.

Yesterday we were exiled for several hours after I mowed and weed-sprayed the front yard (there are dandelions everywhere) to prepare for a showing of the house to backup buyers in case the pending deal falls through. We ran errands all morning and most of the afternoon. In the afternoon when we got home, I again taught — for once, my online students have been very active and intellectually engaged where my live students are not — and filled up with stuff around the house.

What I really want to do is work on law stuff. Unlike pretty much everything else that has been demanding my attention for the past several weeks, it earns me money, it gets something accomplished, and it’s what I do for a living so it gives me pleasure to get the job done. So far today I’ve been able to find time to get a reasonable amount of that work done, but I’m grateful for calendar support — something I’ve always needed in every phase of my professional career — in order to not blow some deadlines. Fortunately, nothing has slipped yet but thanks to a too-full schedule of other crap going on in my life things that I have to do here in Knoxville, one matter got cut a little closer to the bone than I would have preferred.

If I had infinite mental discipline, superb time management skills, and the intellectual energy to focus on all my tasks, I wouldn’t feel stretched so thin. But I have finite mental discipline, time management skills that are fair at best, and after a certain amount of devoting effort to a wide variety of tasks, I experience mental burnout and need to just relax. In other words, I’m only human.

I’d dearly love to have the time to identify, research, consider, and write about some meaty political or legal issue. There’s no shortage of these kinds of issues going on now. About the only thing I’ve caught recently has been Prince Harry demanding to be sent to the front lines in Iraq with the rest of his regiment, which I think shows some real stones. But aside from expressing admiration for the bravery of this young man who could easily engineer a safe military assignment for himself but instead is eager to shoulder his duties, there isn’t a whole lot to say about that story. I know there’s only so much interest out there for information like how The Wife dyed her hair a very pretty shade of red (although I like it).

So maybe tomorrow I’ll find the time to read an entire news site or scour the net for something of interest to comment on. But right now, I’m going to make myself some dinner, and then get back to work. There’s a lot coming due on Thursday — a pleading has to be filed, I have to make a telephonic hearing, and I have a live class. Tomorrow I’ll have lots of papers to grade and lots more work to do. And I’m already feeling a bit burnt-out; this post is made out of “blogger’s guilt” — the bad feeling I get when I don’t post for a while even though I know there are no consequences for my failure to update the blog.