Category: Newsletter (Page 2 of 19)

With both Christmas and New Year’s Day falling in the middle of the week this year, there is an odd rhythm to the final weeks of 2024. I still have a few transactions scrambling to close before the end of the year and there is a scattering of conversations with prospective clients looking towards early 2025, but we have not had our normal internal meetings and won’t again until the new year. Our assistant has also been out so I’m getting a reminder of just how glad I am to have an assistant. Even sending the newsletter this week and next week will probably prove a challenge the workflow has changed since I last published it myself.

I’ll be traveling back to Durham today. We always celebrate the holiday early and there tends to be less traffic on Christmas Day. Then I’ll have something like a two or three day workweek depending on how I choose to spend my Saturday. I haven’t had one of those in a while, but I’m hopeful that a good work sprint will allow me to make progress not just on my outstanding matters but also on a few strategic planning initiatives that I’ve initiated for next year. Next week’s post will be more of a summary of the year. It has certainly had its ups and downs. This one is just a short missive before I gorge myself on breakfast food. I hope that each of you enjoys this holiday, whether you were awakened way too early this morning by excited children or will be traveling most of the day like me.

I’ve never been one to watch parades on television. Even this year, I left the room on Thanksgiving once the television came on. Saturday morning, after a trip to the grocery store, I walked to get my weekly blueberry muffin. This time, instead of returning back to my apartment I headed to meet friends at a prime viewing spot for Durham’s Christmas parade. Until Friday afternoon I didn’t even know that there was a parade, but it wasn’t as if I had alternate plans.

It was sunny, cold, and windy and there was a helicopter overhead that made quite a lot of noise, but my friends’ little guy wasn’t bothered by any of it. He was in his coat and standing in his wagon. And when he got out of the wagon he ran a few laps around a ramp for the building we stood in front of, hair all askew from being under a winter cap. Some of the other children were less enthused about sitting in the cold, but he had the best time of anyone there. The loud cars, the drums, the people, everything—he was smiling and bouncing in his wagon the whole time. People in the parade were drawn to that happiness and that created a virtuous cycle adding even further to his mirth. Then to top it off, there were fire trucks at the end of the parade. Fire trucks are his favorite and he wasn’t about to let a cold wind interfere with his enjoyment of their lights and sirens. I haven’t experienced that level of joy in months.

I could reflect more on the parade—my thoughts about the marching bands, the different civic organizations, two guys walking with a banner (which is what their banner announced), the Mesoamerican dance troupe, or the people handing out tins of sardines—but it was really just about watching the excitement on the little guy’s face.

I haven’t been for the past month or so, but reading fiction in the evenings has been a part of my evening shutdown routine during my better stretches this year. I’ve read mostly science fiction this year in the evenings, which brought a change from my previous habit of more classic literature. There was a short story collection that sparked a few thoughts, but the highlight of this reading was the Red Rising trilogy. I picked up the first one after hearing about it from a couple of the podcasts I listen to occasionally and ended up plowing through all three (there have been subsequent novels set in the same world too but I haven’t read those yet) in perhaps too short a period of time.

The first book starts on a partially terraformed Mars set at some indeterminate point in the future amidst a community of the lowest caste of a solar system wide society spanning from Mercury to the moons of the gas giants. There is interplanetary travel in the story, but there is nothing like hyperdrive and it can take months to traverse between different planets and moons. The main character, Darrow, is a young Helldiver operating deep in the mines of Mars. Then things proceed as Darrow navigates a world dominated by Golds (with a whole lot of other colors in between).

I won’t give a plot summary since I’m not interested in spoiling anything, but it is a wild ride. The action across the three novels is taut and fast-paced. I know that the mental image I have of some of the characters is wildly different than how they are described in the text, but that has never stopped me from enjoying a book before and there isn’t yet a film or television adaptation. The reader gets more of Darrow’s inner thoughts than those of the other characters, but there is a great deal of turmoil in him as he both shapes and is shaped by the events unfolding around him. This also isn’t a simple story of good universally triumphing over evil, and that makes it much more compelling.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, we celebrated my sister-in-law’s birthday. Some of our cousins were driving through on Saturday and so they stopped to surprise her. The older children were the flower girls in my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding, and they love pleasant surprises. I was part of their greeting party. The two older children were so excited to be part of the surprise, to the point of being giddy with their little hands shaking slightly. The youngest had just woken from a nap during the car ride and was carried into the house, but eventually he warmed up too and played various games with the little balls that were some of the only toys on offer. I hadn’t seen the kids or their parents for several months, and seeing the little ones is always a highlight.

The meal was decidedly kid-focused with tater tots and pulled chicken bbq. I sat with the older children during the late lunch and talked to them about school and new friends that they’ve made in their classes this year. The cake was red velvet so I didn’t partake, but everyone else enjoyed it and most ate seconds.

Then we were treated to a ribbon twirling performance set against a background of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus songs as the middle child was given her own birthday gift a few days early too (along with a matching one for the eldest to mitigate any envy). The music would not have been my first choice, but no one asked me and that’s okay. After all, it wasn’t my party.

I’m in Kentucky this week, to the slight detriment of my productivity but to the benefit of my soul. I extended my Thanksgiving stay this year in order to hunt deer last weekend. Independent of the success of the hunt, there is something invigorating about watching a sunrise bring a glow and warmth over a frosty field. There is life in a sunrise that is absent from staring at a computer screen. The sunset has its appeal too, but the sunrise evokes more in me since I see fewer of them due to the orientation of my apartment.

This annual hunt also offers a chance to fill my freezer (and my parents’ too) with venison. I’ll be taking a cooler full of frozen meat back with me, as I do almost every time I come to Kentucky. It is good lean meat that has been a staple of my diet since I was a child, even if I rarely serve it to guests.

I won’t go into any great detail here about the hunt itself, but it was a successful weekend. That means I’ll be able to take another cooler full of meat with me at Christmas when I return. We’re about to start the end-of-year sprint that is integral to our transactional legal practice, so even a short, dedicated time of being in nature should prove very useful.

Even though I walk on the campus on a regular basis, I have no affinity for Duke. Some feelings from childhood simply run too deep to overcome without a truly compelling reason to do so. Seeing a game at Cameron Indoor, though, is something I’ve wanted to do for some time. On Saturday, I got that opportunity.

One of the members of my men’s bible study is a law student with a season ticket in the graduate student section. For games with lower demand early in the season, he is able to get guest tickets. Wofford is exactly that sort of visiting team—a team that is projected to be bottom half of its mid-major conference—but is also my alma mater. I asked him if he could get me a guest ticket, something that I fear took more effort on his part than he let on given his class schedule, but eventually he got three. That meant that we were also joined by one of my Wofford classmates and his wife.

Law students are still able to access their parking lot on game day, so we had game parking as if we were top-level donors. Then we just followed our host, showed our IDs at the ticket booth, received pink wristbands, and were whisked through the entrance doors to our places on the baseline. I say places because there were no seats. This being a student section it was standing room only and two people to each bleacher platform, at least at the start before the crowd thinned later in the game. Then we stood and took in the pregame atmosphere, an atmosphere that hardly approached a fever pitch but was still more than most due to just how small the arena is.

Wofford won the opening tip and scored first to take a 2-0 lead. I jokingly told my friend to take a picture of the scoreboard. Sadly, the comment proved prescient. Wofford proceeded to shoot 2 for 20 from 3 point range in the first half and trailed 51-14 when the halftime buzzer finally sounded. Things like that can happen when plan B is just more of plan A. The second half wasn’t much better for the Terriers, but Duke was in cruise control so the lead didn’t balloon in quite the same manner (though the margin did ultimately exceed 50 after a goaltending call got overturned during the last media timeout).

I took a small step towards repaying the favor by introducing my law student companion to a breakfast place close to campus yesterday morning. He is about to go into cave mode in preparation for exams, the time of the first year of law school that proved most stressful for me. He seems to be in a much better place emotionally than I was at the same point, something I hope continues for him.

I participated in a church men’s retreat this weekend. It was great to get out of the city for a little while and to be out in some cabins in the woods. It was not quite the outdoor experience I would have had if I had gone to Kentucky for the opening weekend of deer season, but I made that scheduling decision well in advance.

There were plenty of ideas presented that could be fodder for rumination, but the one that I’ve been turning over and over is “What is success?” For the first time in several years, this is becoming a live issue for me again. Given the current trajectory of the law firm, we are going to receive more and more financial rewards and we are already experiencing a modicum of professional notoriety in our niche market (though I’m still nowhere near being used to being the “celebrity” in the parasocial relationships that can form when you listen to someone through a number of presentations). These are both good things, things I enjoy. But I already know that they won’t be enough to satisfy.

I don’t have an answer to the question at this juncture and I’m sure that the answer will change as I go through different seasons of life, but thinking about the question and talking about it with a few people over the past few days has pointed me to a few areas where I want to change. Paso a paso.

Last week during my church small group, one of the things I discussed was how I want to do more things with people during the week. I then proceeded to shoot down the first suggestion that was made, perhaps a bit too hastily, but I am the old man of the group and so was forgiven at least by the continued flow of conversation. It wasn’t like I had any ideas myself for the week that is now past, but I threw the request out anyway.

Heading into the weekend, one of the group members posted a directive in our WhatsApp thread. In response, last night a group of us went for dinner at a local taco chain for their discounted Taco Tuesday promotion. For those who have spent any length of time around me, you’ll know that food is very important to me. I’ve planned entire days on vacation around meals. Americanized Mexican food, though, is not one of my regular genres.

Conversation topics varied from English soccer to which TV show I should watch next to engagement stories to meeting people on airplanes to why I wasn’t going to watch any election coverage when I got home to myriad other topics. It was a dinner party atmosphere that I so rarely experience and worth throwing off my meal planning schedule. As for the tacos, I’m glad I did not pay full price. I had some very good tacos in Mexico City earlier this year, and these weren’t in the same league. I still ate all three that I ordered. Then I picked up a second dinner on the way back to my apartment and enjoyed the poke bowl much more. It wasn’t like I made the drive for the food anyway.

Saturday afternoon and early evening, I went over to a friend’s house for a fall gathering. Mind you I went in shorts because it is still plenty warm enough to do so, but at least the beverages had a fall flair to them. I was the first guest to arrive, so I got to help entertain the hosts’ child and try to prepare him some for having so many people over (and him needing to share many of his toys). We sat in the living room as I spoke with my friend about the uptick in work that we’re both experiencing while the little guy danced to the 70s playlist that was coming from the television speakers. There was even a very brief moment where the little guy snuggled into me sitting on the couch. Then a new song started and he jumped down to dance some more. He is already a better dancer than I am, but at least he recognizes me now.

By the time all of the attendees arrived there were something like eighteen people there, seven of whom were under the age of 4. In fact I was the only person there who wasn’t either a child or a parent, making me the outlier of the crowd. I had met most of the people before, but I only know the children’s names. Sorry??? Regardless, I didn’t feel out of place during the evening and enjoyed being around the children. It is refreshing to interact with children, to watch them create worlds in their minds, to see them taking steps towards becoming integrated people. The kids played alongside each other more amicably than I anticipated, at least until the end when tiredness kicked in and tolerance waned.

There was even some time around a fire pit to cap off the festivities during which the men and boys went outside and the women and girls stayed inside for whatever confluence of reasons. I did not partake in any of the s’mores that others enjoyed, but the smile on the face of one of the children and the mess he made of that face were still memorable.

This weekend, we went to Boston on a work trip. It was my first time back since I graduated law school, but it was a very quick trip that was almost purely work-related. We only decided to make the trip a few weeks ago, so our travel options were limited. We stayed in one of the very few remaining Airbnb options that had multiple bedrooms. It was a place to sleep in Cambridge; that was fine and all we needed from it. What has been much more of an issue so far this week is my decision to take a very early flight back on Sunday morning. It is a decision that goes squarely into the “penny wise pound foolish” category, especially given how much energy I had to expend on Saturday to be “on” at the conference and the reception that followed.

I don’t sleep well normally, and I was sleeping at a rental, and I don’t know why I even bother setting an alarm when I need to wake up during la madrugada (a word that we don’t have in English but should). I woke up for good around 4:30 and took a rideshare to get to the airport around 5 for the early flight. It all meant that I was back at my apartment before 9 AM on Sunday, but I was out of it. I went to church to try to maintain some normalcy to the day but had a hard time focusing. Then when I got back I ate lunch, took a nap, and woke up more tired than before. The afternoon was a wash. Then to top it off I regressed during curling Sunday evening and fell more than I have since the first week of the season implementing the form change. At least I didn’t fall on Monday night (though my performance still left much to be desired).

Even writing this on Wednesday morning, I’m still feeling the effects of needing to be on all day Saturday for the conference and then flying back so early on Sunday. This has led to new rules for booking work travel, but the short-term damage is already done. It is my hope that at least these new rules will improve things in what is already shaping up to be a busy 2025 filled with work travel.