Salvation Amy

Hard to tell who the bigger assholes are here, Drudge, or the White House. I long for the days when a political (or journalistic) career did not require the ability to make issues out of non-issues.

The new courthouse really is a thing of beauty, but this article is correct. There are kinks everywhere. Yesterday I was there with a client and noticed that the edge of a truly lovely marbleish wall had no molding or anything, so you could just look behind it and see where they slapped it up with plaster. There are cracks in the floor.

I think there is more, structurally and design-wise, in the new family court to sort of instill respect for the court in litigants. I remember walking into the old family court at one time, and it was SUCH a zoo that I kind of thought, maybe this has something to do with why people don’t take their child support obligations seriously. But the old courthouse, where all the other courts were housed, was magnificent. Now it’s being turned into offices for or by MBNA, and there’s a lawyers guns and money joke in there somewhere.

But the biggest kink, both at the new courthouse and the old, is that the people in the Prothonotary’s office are just plain rude, and no one (And I mean NO ONE) in Family Court EVER answers their phone or returns phone calls, with the notable exceptions of the Judges’ secretaries and case managers. NO ONE. EVER.

This guy has won his fight with the local DMV. He is a wingnut, but he’s won the fight. So he’s got that going for him.

Well, I wish I had seen the segment where Katie Couric was ready to strangle Ann Coulter… I almost wouldn’t know who to root for. Except I’d be behind Katie.

I never did really get the movie Six Degrees of Separation, but something about this story makes me sad, all the same. I love the part about Kuby telling him to stop doing these things. In my experience, this works out to be about 95% of a lawyers job. Usually it’s fruitless.

Sometimes I really miss Vermont. I don’t know if there’s anywhere else in the universe where you could find this kind of competition reported in the local papers.

Now I like the chickens as much as the next guy, so, Zach, don’t yell at me. I just think this is funny, after I found out, with much relief, that the chicken was okay.

This works in much the same way that I thought it was funny when my idiot college age brother let his idiot friends send him for a ride down the stairs of his dorm in a mail cart. After I found out he wasn’t dead. And when I heard that the ER doctor said it was the worst head injury he’d ever seen on someone who wasn’t drunk when they got it. That Kind of Funny.

So don’t anyone go all vegan on my ass - It is idiots I think are funny. Idiots that think it is a good idea to go down stairs in mail carts. Idiots who tie helium balloons to chickens to see if they float…

I finally got to meet little Zachie’s new girl Tina. She was quite nice, although she had done something quite unfortunate to his hair that left him a little Pippi Longstocking looking. In spite of what she did to his hair, she seemed quite centered and good for Zach. I couldn’t sit and talk too long, as was exhausted, but I did get a nice foccacia in the oven for zach before I did, which I am afraid to look in the kitchen to see if he remembered to take it out of the oven. Because it is so much fun to cook for a vegan teenager.

In addition to Tina, and Zach, Ruthie was here too, and I thought she was going to sleep over, but then she didn’t. I think she’s afraid of me, and she said also she’s afraid of my grandmother’s ashes in the living room, which, apparently, the boys told her during a rousing game of Freak Out the Babysitter. And there’s nothing worse than having your babysitter look to you for validation on something that has freaked her out, and then you have to go, Well, Yeah, I do keep my grandma’s ashes in the living room.

I hate boys.

Here is a creepy article from Harpers about "the Foundation" that makes my blood run cold. I have suspected that this kind of thing was going on somewhere for a long, long, time. I thought, however, that it was just subconscious individual motivation. The fact that these people are organized, is creepier than I could have imagined.

Good Alternet interview with the author of the article, who summed up what I’ve suspected about the white american male power structure this way:

The religious context is real. The Old Boys Network is about business. This is about more than business. This is about maintaining a certain kind of power, a certain view of how power should be distributed.

After literally (no, not figuratively) months of complaining that we were the MEANEST PARENTS EVER for making him go to camp, Nicky has gone, and is now home. We got one letter from him, written the first day, that went like this:

Dear Dad and Amy,

P.S. I love you.

BUT, last night he called us from his mom’s to tell us he was home and went into the whole litany of fun and told us everything he did every day, basketball, soccer, football, “guess which was my favorite,” “Basketball?” “yes,” and “here are the songs we learned and I thought the songs were going to be all religious but they were really funny” and he made a t-shirt that said “Kirkwood 2003″ and “WWJD” and on the back it says “Dagle” and then under that “12″ (”because you’re 12, right? I get it,” “Yeah”) and at the bottom Nick and this girl signed the shirt “Have a great summer” and “to my boyfriend” but he’s not her boyfriend she just wrote that on everyone’s shirt and his mom will get him some of the paint they used to make the shirts so now he’s in shirt making heaven, and he’s going back next year, and yeah - he knows that he said he didn’t want to but, just to clarify, he wants to be sure I get it that he’s going back to THIS camp, and not just any camp. Whew.

So, just in case you’re wondering, kids, sometimes, when we make you do stuff you don’t want to do, it’s because we suspect you might enjoy it. And, sometimes, we are right.

Andy’s at camp this week, and Charlie goes in a little under two weeks, and Caro a few weeks after that. I hope it’s a hit with everyone.