very simple

A very very long time ago, I noted sitting near Daniel Day-Lewis while at dinner, but not recognizing him because he looked remarkably like a homeless bike messenger.

It’s good to see that he’s toned down the bike messenger aspect of that.

…well, sort of.

I’m trying out this new thing, which involves shipping my luggage to my destination prior to my trip.  I had read about it in a few places, and decided to give it a whirl this time around.  Not for the first part of my trip, mind you, but for the second part, which involves attending a 3-day long wedding.  Somehow, it seemed really illogical to drag an entire bag filled with fancy dresses and shiny shoes around southern India for a week and a half.  So I’m trying this out by shipping a bag full of that sort of thing (and hair products, and cosmetics, and all of the stuff that is entirely unnecessary for the part of the trip that involves sharing a hotel room with my brother for 9 days) directly to Singapore, where it should arrive several days before me.

Hopefully, everything will be fine.  Otherwise the bride will just have to contend with my wearing shorts and flip flops to her elaborately planned 3-day long traditional hindu wedding.  I’m sure she’ll understand. 

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve started going to the gym regularly, including seeing a trainer.  Well, this week, since I was incredibly busy at work, including two work-related holiday parties in the evening, I decided to switch my evening cardio to the morning, and Monday and Tuesday I got up super early and did the elliptical machine for 45 minutes each time.  Wednesday morning, I saw my trainer as usual, and then proceeded to go to work until about 11pm.  So, needless to say, I decided to sleep a bit later and skip the gym on Thursday.  Makes perfect sense, right?

Except that, I was more exhausted on Thursday than I have been on any day this week, in which Monday, when I got home at 10:30pm, was my early night.  So I was back at the gym this morning in order to perk myself up.

Apparently I’ve turned into one of those people who now functions better when she exercises.  Which is a good thing (objectively), but now I’m going to feel doubly guilty whenever I decide to sleep in.  And I love my sleep…

Not quite a lost weekend, but I somehow ended up losing most of the day today.  Went out early this morning and ran the errands I needed to run, fully planning on going out in the afternoon and doing…something (not quite sure what, but I do like to get out and at least take a walk for a few hours.  This usually turns into some sort of shopping trip, but that’s not such a terrible thing).  But then I got home, made some lunch, and promptly fell asleep on the couch for about 7 hours.  And had some really bizarre dreams about people breaking into my apartment.  Which was incredibly disconcerting when I woke up and everything was exactly the same as I had left it seven hours earlier.  Ah, well.  I guess that leaves tomorrow to go do all those unspecified things that I really had no plans for (and see my trainer). 

Who: Sam Waterston, otherwise known as ADA extraordinaire Jack McCoy on Law and Order.

Where: sitting across the aisle from me on Metro North this morning. Rocking a fedora.

I debated bothering him to find out about when his darn show would start again, but I thought better of it and just read my book instead. 

Ages and ages ago, I blogged about my intense phobia of bug pictures:

But watch me flip a page in a book and come across a photograph of an insect? and you’re next watching me run from the room trying not to vomit. Even when I was a little kid, and I got my first world book encyclopedia, I’d come across a photograph of an ant or a fly, and I had to turn my head and oh-so-gently flip the page over by the very corner, so that I wasn’t even touching the picture of the bug.

I also, not quite so strangely, really don’t like needles.  So, you can imagine what my morning was like yesterday, when I went for a physical for the first time in god knows how long, and discovered that, not only would I need to get five (five!) different needles stuck in me (blood test, TB test, tetantus shot (since it’s been 11 years since my last one) and, because I’m going to India in January, both a polio booster and a typhoid shot!), and perhaps a few more depending on whether the MMR and hepatitis antibodies show up in my blood test (I vaguely remember being required to get the hep b vaccine when I went to law school, but I can’t remember if I got all the boosters), it was the artwork in the exam room that really freaked me out.

You see, my new doctor (who is great), has these (theoretically interesting) framed scientific journal-like drawings of, yep, insects, on the walls of the exam room that I was in.  I spent most of the appointment staring at the EKG machine, and I’m sure the nurse thought I was weird. 

Only me.

At six am this morning, I was standing in my building lobby waiting for a car to take me to Pennsylvania.  I had to give a presentation to some clients.  All good, except there isn’t an espresso to be found anywhere in the Lehigh Valley, and the bagels are like kaiser rolls with holes in the middle.  It probably wasn’t helped by the fact that, yesterday morning, I woke up at the lovely hour of four in the morning, for no damn reason whatsoever. 

The plus side?  I billed over 11 hours today, and still got home by six pm.  And, I get to sleep in tomorrow morning thanks to the long overdue physical I have an appointment for at 11am (I wanted to make sure I’m up on all the necessary vaccinations and anti-malarials before I went jetting off to the asian subcontinent in two months).

Which reminds me that I have to work on getting that darn visa…

The NY Times this weekend had an article on my absolutely favorite property class topic ever – adverse possession. 

Essentially, if you take certain steps, you can claim title to someone else’s property without, you know, paying for it:

Under the current law, as articulated by the Court of Appeals in June 2006 in the case of Walling v. Przybylo, a claim of adverse possession can be made if an individual “openly, notoriously and exclusively” uses someone else’s property continuously for 10 years, believing he has the right to do so.

It’s a favorite of law school professors, particularly around exam time, and one of the property professors at my law school (not mine) was actually attempting to adversely possess a neighboring piece of property and would discuss it in class. 

So anyway, why did I love this subject?  Because I actually investigated at one point the possibility of having my dad adversely possess the land across the road from our old house in the Berkshires.  The owner was absentee, the house was an eyesore (including a bright orange tarp instead of a roof), and I figured, if we could spend enough time fixing things up and generally using the property as our own, we could, eventually, lay claim to it outright.  However, as I ALSO learned, you cannot claim adverse possession over property of someone who is in prison.  And yep, the owner was apparently put in jail for arson, when he tried to burn down the house for the insurance money.  It may seem silly now, but the attempt to practically apply this esoteric section of property law to my own life actually helped me understand and remember the concept.  Which came in really handy at exam time.

(by the way, the law actually varies depending on the state – in some, it only takes five years.  In others, you need to also make "substantial improvements" to the property). 

Oh, and the next time you’re walking around New York City, keep an eye out for little plaques embedded in the sidewalk on streetcorners, that say things like "property of…", particularly where buildings, for decorative reasons, don’t extent all the way to the property line.  These are there to give pedestrians "permission" to cross into the space.  Because explicit permission to enter property automatically defeats claims of adverse possession.  After learning this little fact from my professor, I’ve noticed hundreds of these while walking down manhattan streets.

Look’s like CNN has taken a page from Deborah Solomon’s playbook.

Maybe I shouldn’t have had that double espresso at 4 in the afternoon yesterday.  I’ve been waking up every 2-3 hours all night (1am, 3am, and 5am), freaking out that I’ve somehow slept through my alarm and am going to miss my appointment with my personal trainer this morning.  Now I’m worried that if I try to go back to sleep for another hour until my alarm is actually set to go off, I will definitely sleep through it…

Ah, insomnia…at least you give me the extra time in my day to write inane blog posts for NaNoBloMo.

update: or, you know, NaBloPoMo, which is the actual name, which I can actually remember when I don’t wake up every two freaking hours!