Last week, I was supposed to take a deposition on Thursday, at a prison about two hours away. On Wednesday, I called to make sure everything was set up, and learned that the prisoner was transferred. Yesterday. To a prison literally around the corner, but they wouldn't bring him back for the deposition, nor would they let me into the other prison on one day's notice. It ended up being for the best, because if I had taken the deposition Thursday, I would have come back to a letter from the court that basically meant I would have had to depose the prisoner again later. I was still not pleased, though.

Random minor events on Thursday: jobs for everyone! Two people we know, a law school classmate of mine, and one of Chad's former students, let us know that they got good jobs. And our bay window was put in and looks very nice.

And then there was the Blackout. ( Our experience was hardly deserving of the capital letter )

As a bonus, on Friday we were let out at 1:00 to conserve power and help get downstate back up. I came home and read a book (see the book log), went out for dinner and to buy the sequels, and then read one of them.

On Saturday, we went looking for a dog and decided we weren't going to any more shelters on the "Oh, why not?" theory, because it was just too wrenching. We headed up to Lake George to see how long a drive it would be for Albacon—about an hour each way—and had good Mexican food on the way back. Then we watched the video of The Golden Spiders, the Nero Wolfe TV movie that came before the series. It was pretty good; it had a better Saul (the actor who played Lon Cohen in the series; he was recast because of time commitments), but didn't have a lot of the details quite down yet.

Sunday, did a ton of laundry, read the other sequel, helped Chad fix our gate fence, and spent the evening in that lovely tired-but-insomniac state. Grr. Thus, on Monday I went to bed early, and Tuesday I wrote a week in review post that got eaten, and I gave up in disgust. (Also, the rest of our windows were installed.)

On Wednesday we got our new dog, Emmy, as already mentioned here. ( Dog talk, the good and the bad )

I have two sets of legal papers to get out Tuesday, before we leave, plus doing laundry and packing and all that. Then we're off to Chicago for a week. We'll have Internet access, but don't expect to see us much until the middle of next week.

Belated meme: I've added a "policy" on friending, linking, etc., to my user info.

Link of the week: Letters from Space (specifically, the Space Station).

Another quiet week at work, mostly spent immersing myself in an unfamiliar area of law for a new case. We had an enjoyable visit with my parents this weekend; among other things, we went to see Ghosts of the Abyss, a 3-D IMAX movie about an expedition to the Titanic. I didn't see the movie Titanic, and have no great emotional connections to the ship Titanic, but this was quite well-done and even moving in spots. As a technology, however, 3-D is still not ready for prime-time: either I didn't notice it, or it was actively distracting (and in my case, painful. My motion-sick self isn't doing that again.).

We brought another eight boxes of books down from my parents', which is the last of the lot. I have many more books than I'd thought. The hardcover shelves will do for now, once we rescue one of them from the paperbacks, but even there, we don't have as much free space as I'd thought we would. I didn't even touch the paperbacks tonight, too much work.

Finally, a post-script to last weekend's power outage. At 6:45 p.m. Sunday, I pulled into the driveway, picked up the glasses case that I'd dropped on the ground, saw that the lights still weren't on, and headed back to the hotel to spend a miserable, uncomfortable, mostly-sleepless night.

This week, one of our next-door neighbors told us that the power came back on, not around 7 a.m. Monday as we'd thought, but around 7 p.m. Sunday.

Timing really is everything . . .

 . . . sleep in our own bed tonight!

The power came back on sometime today—thankfully, because staying in the hotel last night was utterly miserable.

There were a grand total of nine cars in the parking lot when we checked in. Even though the hotel was virtually empty, the clerk put us next door to someone else. And either the walls in those rooms are paper-thin, or the volume on the next-door TV was all the way up—or both—because we could hear the next-door person's TV very clearly. In fact, we could hear it very clearly all night.

I didn't fall asleep until sometime after 12:30. And I woke up at 2:43, and 4:23 (which was disconcerting until I re-assembled the numbers in the right order in my head), and 6:11, and then stayed basically awake until the alarm went off at 7:00.

And the TV was still on!

Surprisingly, I had a pretty productive day despite my serious sleep-deprivation. Got two things sent off that had been on my back for a while. One was a form of writing that I'm out of practice in, so it was just a relief to finally have it done. It will probably be revised to death by my supervisors, which I'm currently unconcerned about (we'll see how long that holds up during the actual revision process). The other was motion papers in a case that's probably my most important to date, in terms of the breadth of the immediate consequences if we lose. (I give it 50-50 odds that my papers will seriously annoy opposing counsel. Oh well . . . )

It looks like no further water damage was done to stuff in the basement, so that's good. I really should have cleaned tonight, but it's been an effort staying awake long enough for the basketball game. Which is now on, so I will leave you all.

Friday morning, there was a quarter inch of solid ice on my car. It took me half an hour to clear it off so that I could go to work. Schenectady got another quarter inch during the day; I got less in Albany, where it's generally warmer. It continued spitting ice Friday night, and wasn't supposed to let up until mid-day Saturday. Since my parents were getting the same kind of weather out in Massachusetts, we said, "Well, guess we're not going to visit them this weekend."

Friday night at 10:00, the power went out, flickered back on, and then went out for good. When it went out the second time, we said, "Well, guess it's time for bed."

[ The important thing to note here is that, though our furnace is gas, the heat gets disturbed through a forced-air system. Which runs on electricity. Which means no heat when the electricity's out. Which is incredibly stupid, in my opinion: if you've got gas coming in for the heat anyway, why not rig the fans and such so they run on gas, too? ]

Saturday morning the power still wasn't on, so we went to Bruegger's for a leisurely breakfast. Came back, power still wasn't on, so we went to Chad's office. Came back around lunchtime, cleared an additional inch of snow and ice off the other car, discovered that power still wasn't on, and said, "Well, guess we're going to Whitney Point for the night." Chad's parents weren't getting the same bad weather, live closer than my parents, and had his grandmother and one of his great-aunts up anyway, who we wanted to see.

Went to the Point, had a nice dinner, watched Kansas *thump* Marquette—who knew?—and Syracuse pull it out against Texas. Go, Syracuse. Slept a bit fitfully (we've gotten out of the habit of sleeping in a double bed) but warmly. Stayed through lunch and then headed back: power or no power, we had things to do that couldn't really be accomplished there. Chad's parents are really way too good to us.

Still no power. It was about forty degrees in the house. According to the recording on the power company's phone, power is expected to be restored late Monday. We said, "Well, guess we're going to a hotel." Before we do that, though, we have the exciting experience of bailing out an alarming quantity of water from the sump pump hole (because, of course, the sump pump runs on electricity) and moving around some stuff that got wet. (It's a good thing we didn't put the paperback shelves in the basement . . . )

Between this and the 100+ inches of snow we've had this season, this has really been a great introduction to the joys of home ownership.

To be fair, I usually don't get too worked up over things I can't control, like weather and traffic, so it could be much worse.