very simple

It’s been a really long week at work, for many reasons, but the biggest one is that this is our first 5-day week in the office since before Christmas. Compounded by the fact that the sun sets at, like, two in the afternoon and sunlight becomes hard to come by, so you have to find the beauty in 6th Avenue at night while waiting for the bus…

Work has been a little busy lately, so I’m going to the “things sitting on my desk” well already. Bluetooth speaker. Invaluable when traveling (at the destination – I’m polite enough to use headphones during the actual travel portions of the trip!).

It’s a two-fer today, since I fell down on the job last night. So…a theme.

I don’t know how it started, but I’ve ended up with a collection of mugs from all of my (grown-up) jobs. But they’re starting to turn into bad omens after not one, but two(!) law firms that I previously worked for have gone bankrupt following my departure. At least I have this lovely commemorative swag.

First, I worked at Reid & Priest as a summer associate in 1998, the summer it merged with Thelen, Marrin, Johnston & Bridges. I left Thelen Reid & Priest in 2003 with a group, and it went belly up in 2008-2009 after it merged with another firm that (at least according to the stories I’ve heard) saddled it with unmanageable debt.

The firm I moved to and stayed at quite happily until they kicked me out in a misguided effort to save money by firing profitable associates was Dewey Ballantine, which eventually became Dewey & LeBoeuf, and which finally, last year, became an object lesson in how to turn a highly respected law firm with a 100-year history into an industry joke.

A little delay in getting this posted, thanks to a major server outage last night at my hosting provider. Things seem to be back up and running this morning, so…fingers crossed. Cute cocktail stirrers that I ended up with. Now I just need to have more cocktail parties to utilize them!

Well, maybe not the last tree, but given the rate at which I’ve seen dead christmas trees out on the sidewalk for garbage pickup in the past few days, it’s certainly one of the very few left. And it’s the most famous tree around. I had to pop by my office today for something, so I decided to use the excuse of going to midtown to wander up near Rockefeller Center. No way was I going to fight the crowd to get any closer – working in this neighborhood for a dozen years will cure anyone of that desire.

Another classic – the clock in the middle of grand central station.

That’s right – it only took three days, and I’m already resorting to cat photos.

I actually took this last night as I was wandering around on my last day off for the holidays. Yet another really cool piece of street furniture that often gets overlooked in favor of the flatiron building across the street.

While my SLR will forever remain my primary camera, I’m going to spend some time experimenting with more mobile options – in particular because I’ll be more likely to remember to take pictures if I don’t wed myself to the “fancy” camera over my iPhone 5. More mobile tools also means not having to wait until I get to my home computer to edit/upload. This was taken with my iPhone, uploaded to Dropbox to share with my iPad, then edited on the iPad with snapseed (drama filter and frame) and iWatermark (copyright bug). Now posting to my blog with the WordPress app.

My traditional weekender breakfast, consisting of an espresso and a bottle of pellegrino. And squatting at my favorite non-chain local cafe/coffee shop/wine bar for a few hours.

I’ve been periodically contemplating starting a new 365 project, despite the fact that I’ve failed to complete any of the group projects that I’ve participated in in the past. Maybe a self-directed one will work better. At the very least, I’ll only be disappointing myself if I fail (again).

In the spirit of getting things started with tomorrow as day 1, here’s a preview. Took myself to PJ Clarke’s for New Year’s Eve lunch (because I’m off of work). They have very fancy ketchup here.